April 13 news: Earlier today, Linux founder Linus Torvalds submitted a change in Kernel's GitHub Master, officially bringing the Kernel from the 3 era into the 4 era. The Linux kernel has officially entered the 4.0 era.

—The "live kernel patching" feature, which is a merger of Red Hat's Kpatch and SUSE's kGraft, can patch the kernel in real time without requiring a reboot;

—Improved graphics support: the Radeon DRM driver supports display port audio output and improved fan control. HSA AMDKFD has begun development for the Carrizo APU; on the Intel graphics driver front, Skylake support has basically taken shape; support for N-series display solutions has also been improved.

—Storage system improvements, including related support for pNFS and Btrfs RAID 5/6, and OverlayFS has also added some new features.

—In addition, the new kernel supports more hardware, including Intel Quark SoC and more ARM devices, IBM z13, and improved support for Toshiba series laptops and Logitech input devices.

The release of Linux 4.0 allows users to not need to restart the operating system. In most servers or data centers, one reason people like to use Linux is that you don't need to perform reboots frequently. Admittedly, some critical patches require a reboot, but you can wait months before doing so. Now, thanks to the release of the Linux 4.0 kernel, you may be able to go for years without rebooting.

A Linux distribution refers to what is commonly called the "Linux operating system". It is generally produced and released by some organizations, groups, companies, or individuals. The Linux kernel is mainly used as part of a Linux distribution. Generally speaking, a Linux distribution includes the Linux kernel, a set of installation tools for installing the entire software onto a computer, various GNU software, and other free software. Some Linux distributions may include some proprietary software. Distributions are made for many different purposes, including support for different computer hardware architectures, adjustments for use by ordinary users or developers, development for real-time applications or embedded systems, and so on. Currently, more than three hundred distributions are actively developed, and there are about a dozen of the most commonly used distributions. The better-known ones include Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, and Mageia. Linux distributions are also often used as operating systems for supercomputers. Of the top 500 supercomputers announced in November 2010, 459 (91.8%) ran Linux distributions.

On October 5, 1991, Linus Torvalds posted a message on the comp.os.minix newsgroup, officially announcing the birth of the Linux kernel. In March 1994, Linux 1.0 was released, with 170,000 lines of code.