What does the kernel do?
Linux began in 1991 when Linus Torvalds started writing an operating system for Intel 386- and 486-based personal computers. He was inspired by the Minix operating system written by Andrew S. Tanenbaum 4 years earlier. Linux differed in many ways from Minix; the main difference being that it was a 32-bit virtual memory kernel and the code was open source, later released under the GPL v2 license. He announced it on August 25, 1991, on the comp.os.minix
newsgroup in a famous post that began with the following:
To be strictly accurate, Linus...