Major Kernel Releases
From version 0.01 to the modern era
This is a selective list of landmark kernel releases. The Linux kernel follows a time-based release model (roughly every 9–10 weeks) since version 2.6, so only major milestones are listed here rather than every point release.
| Version | Date | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| 0.01 | Sep 1991 | First release. 10,239 lines. Ran Bash and GCC on i386. |
| 0.12 | Jan 1992 | Re-licensed under GPL v2. Community contributions begin. |
| 1.0 | Mar 1994 | First "production" release. TCP/IP networking, ext2 filesystem. |
| 1.2 | Mar 1995 | Alpha, SPARC, MIPS architecture support added. |
| 2.0 | Jun 1996 | SMP support. Multiple architectures. First truly multiplatform release. |
| 2.2 | Jan 1999 | Improved SMP, new networking stack, support for large memory. |
| 2.4 | Jan 2001 | USB, ISA Plug-and-Play, ext3 journaling filesystem, iptables. |
| 2.6 | Dec 2003 | Major rewrite of scheduler (O(1)), NPTL threads, sysfs, udev, SELinux. |
| 3.0 | Jul 2011 | Version number change (from 2.6.39). Chosen for Linux's 20th anniversary. |
| 3.8 | Feb 2013 | Full support for user namespaces, enabling unprivileged containers. |
| 4.0 | Apr 2015 | Live kernel patching support. |
| 4.15 | Jan 2018 | Meltdown/Spectre mitigations (KPTI). AMD Secure Memory Encryption. |
| 5.0 | Mar 2019 | Energy-aware scheduling, Adiantum encryption, AMD FreeSync. |
| 5.4 | Nov 2019 | LTS release. exFAT support, kernel lockdown, io_uring. |
| 5.10 | Dec 2020 | LTS release. EXT4 fast commits, static calls for performance. |
| 5.15 | Oct 2021 | LTS release. NTFS3 driver, DAMON memory management, KFENCE. |
| 6.0 | Oct 2022 | Another version bump. Improved Rust infrastructure in kernel tree. |
| 6.1 | Dec 2022 | LTS release. First release with merged Rust support. MGLRU. |
| 6.6 | Oct 2023 | LTS release. Intel shadow stack (CET), network improvements. |
| 6.12 | Nov 2024 | LTS release. Preempt-RT merged. Real-time Linux in mainline. |
| 6.19 | Feb 2026 | Last release of the 6.x series. Kernel source surpasses 39.8 million lines. |
| 7.0 | Apr 2026 | New major version. Rust in mainstream kernel subsystems, new scheduler, self-healing filesystem improvements. Linux turns 35. |
For the complete changelog of every release, see kernelnewbies.org or the official kernel.org archives.