Linux: A Platform for the Cloud

“The goal of this article is to review the history and
architecture of Linux as well as its present day developments to
understand how Linux has become today’s leading platform for cloud
computing. We will start with a little history on Unix system
development and then move to the Linux system itself.

“Starting Small!

“The story of Linux as a platform for cloud computing starts in
1969 with the creation of the Unix2 Operating System at AT&T
Bell Laboratories. Unix was first developed on mini-computers,
which had very small memory address spaces by today’s standards.
The PDP-11 (one of the main systems used for the early development
of Unix) had an address space of 64 thousand bytes of memory for
instructions, and (on some models) 64 thousand extra bytes for
data. Therefore the kernel of the operating system had to be very
small and lean.

“Moving from its original architecture of the PDP-7, onto the
PDP-11 (and later onto other architectures), the kernel also
divided into architectural independent and architectural dependent
parts, with most of the kernel migrating from machine language into
the “C” language. The advantage of this architectural
move was two-fold: to isolate the parts of the kernel that might be
affected by vulgarities in the hardware architecture and to remove
as much as possible the tediousness of writing in non-portable
machine-language code, which typically led to a more stable
operating system.”

Complete Story