• 2 min read
Linux 0.11 Gets a 47,000-Line Rust Rewrite
A Beihang University student has rewritten Linux 0.11 in Rust, producing a 47,000-line project that includes more than just the kernel.
Image: The Register
A new project called linux-0.11-rs has reimplemented an early version of the Linux kernel in Rust, arriving just days after Linus Torvalds challenged critics of his comments about AI to fork the kernel themselves.
The timing is striking, but the project is not actually a fork—and it is not a modern Linux port. Created by “Poseidon,” an undergraduate student at Beihang University in Beijing, it is a rewrite based on Linux 0.11, released on December 8, 1991.
Linux 0.11 and the first contributors
Linux 0.11 was released only a few months after Linux 0.01 and was the final Linux release of 1991. Version 0.12 followed in January 1992, while the version number jumped to 0.95 in March as Torvalds began counting down to Linux 1.0, which arrived two years later.
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In the original 0.11 release notice, Torvalds wrote:
“Linux-0.11 has a few rather major improvements, but perhaps most notably, is the first kernel where some other people start making real contributions.”
He also described the release as a milestone that made Linux “much more powerful than Minix was at the time,” and noted the arrival of Ted Ts’o as a contributor.
A 47,000-line Rust rewrite
The Rust project is considerably larger than the original kernel. According to analysis by users of the “Orange Site,” linux-0.11-rs contains just over 47,000 lines of Rust. User dminik, citing an automatic code analyzer, estimated that roughly 15,000 lines belong to the kernel, with the remainder consisting of utilities, libraries, and programs that run on it.
That makes the project broader than a kernel rewrite: it also attempts to reproduce the core operating-system environment that existed at the end of Linux’s first year.
Poseidon credits a tutorial on writing an operating-system kernel in Rust, suggesting the work was not entirely generated by a bot. Some Hacker News commenters dismissed it as a waste of tokens, water, and electricity. But the project also represents a student experimenting with systems programming—and possibly with code-generating tools.
Nobody is likely to deploy a bot-generated rewrite of a prototype kernel from 35 years ago. The original Linux, after all, was written by a 22-year-old who was doing it “Just for Fun.”
Computing Editor
Tomas lives in the terminal. He covers chips, laptops, and operating systems with a focus on performance and efficiency. He reads kernel changelogs the way other people read fiction, and he's always on the hunt for the perfect mechanical keyboard switch. If it processes data, Tomas has an opinion on it.
via The Register
