So in August 1991, he ported the teaching operating system called Minix to the
Intel 80386 platform and offered the code to readers of the Usenet newsgroup,
comp.os.minix.
The Linux Source Tree
The kernel source code lives in a group of directories called the kernel source tree. This
tree??™s structure is important because the process of compiling the kernel is automated.
When you compile a kernel, make is actually running a series of scripts. The scripts, makefiles,
expect to find pieces of the kernel code in specific places. If they are not there, the
makefile breaks, and the kernel is incomplete. You will learn how to compile a kernel
with make later in the chapter.
You don??™t need the kernel source code on your system for Linux to run??”you just need
the compiled kernel binaries for that. If you ever want to compile a kernel, you need to
install the kernel-sources package from YaST.
The sources are stored in /usr/src/linux, which contains several directories; the most
important for you is the Documentation directory. In these files, you should find about
everything you need to know about the kernel and its various modules.
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