Legal information

Due to U.S. Exports Regulations, all cryptographic software on this site is subject to the following legal notice:

This site includes publicly available encryption source code which, together with object code resulting from the compiling of publicly available source code, may be exported from the United States under License Exception "TSU" pursuant to 15 C.F.R. Section 740.13(e).

This legal notice applies to cryptographic software only. Please see the Bureau of Industry and Security for more information about current U.S. regulations.

Our servers are located in Corvallis, Oregon, USA; Palo Alto and San Francisco, California, USA; Portland, Oregon, USA; and Montréal, Québec, Canada.

Use in violation of any applicable laws is prohibited.

Linux is a Registered Trademark of Linus Torvalds. All trademarks are property of their respective owners.

What is Linux?

Linux is a clone of the operating system Unix, written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims towards POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance.

It has all the features you would expect in a modern fully-fledged Unix, including true multitasking, virtual memory, shared libraries, demand loading, shared copy-on-write executables, proper memory management, and multistack networking including IPv4 and IPv6.

Although originally developed first for 32-bit x86-based PCs (386 or higher), today Linux also runs on a multitude of other processor architectures, in both 32- and 64-bit variants.

New to Linux?

If you're new to Linux, you don't want to download the kernel, which is just a component in a working Linux system. Instead, you want what is called a distribution of Linux, which is a complete Linux system. There are numerous distributions available for download on the Internet as well as for purchase from various vendors; some are general-purpose, and some are optimized for specific uses. We currently have mirrors of several distributions available at https://mirrors.kernel.org/.

Note, however, that most distributions are very large (several gigabytes), so unless you have a fast Internet link you may want to save yourself some hassle and purchase a CD-ROM with a distribution; such CD-ROMs are available from a number of vendors.

Mailing lists

The Linux kernel is discussed on the linux-kernel mailing list at vger.kernel.org. Please read the FAQ before subscribing.

Although there is no official archive site, unofficial archives of the list can be found at:

• https://lkml.org/
• https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel