History of Portability in Linux

When Linus first unleashed Linux on the unsuspecting world, it ran only on Intel 386 machines. Although the operating system was rather generalized and well written, portability was not a major concern. In fact, Linus even once suggested Linux would never run on anything but the i386 architecture! In 1993, however, work began on porting Linux to the Digital Alpha architecture. The Digital Alpha was a modern high-performance RISC-based architecture with 64-bit memory addressing. This is a stark contrast to Linus's original 386. Nonetheless, the initial port of Linux to the Alpha took about a year, and the Alpha became the first officially supported architecture after x86. This port was perhaps rather difficult because it had the unwelcome challenge of being the first. Instead of simply grafting support for the Alpha onto the kernel, pieces of the kernel were rewritten as needed with portability in mind^[1]. Although this made for more work overall, the result was much cleaner and future porting was made much easier.

Although the first releases of Linux supported only the Intel x86 architecture, the 1.2 kernel series supported Digital Alpha, Intel x86, MIPS, and SPARCalthough support was somewhat experimental.

With the release of the 2.0 kernel, Linux officially added support for the Motorola 68k and PowerPC. Additionally, the architectures previously supported in 1.2 were labeled official and stable.

The 2.2 kernel series brought even more architecture support with the addition of ARM, IBM S/390, and UltraSPARC. A few years later, 2.4 nearly doubled the number of supported architectures to 15, as support was added for the CRIS, IA-64, 64-bit MIPS, HP PA-RISC, 64-bit IBM S/390, and Hitachi SH.

The current kernel, 2.6, brought the number of supported architectures to 20 with the addition of Motorola 68k without MMU, M32xxx, H8/300, IBM POWER, v850, x86-64, and a version of the kernel that runs in a virtual machine under Linux, known as Usermode Linux. The 64-bit s390 port was folded into the 32-bit s390 port, removing the duplication.

It should be noted that each of these architectures supports various chip and machine types. Some supported architectures, such as ARM and PowerPC, each support many different chips and machine types. Therefore, although Linux runs under 20 broad architectures, it runs on many more different machines!