Joining the Linux Foundation

Today Twitter officially joins the Linux Foundation (@linuxfoundation), the nonprofit consortium dedicated to protecting and promoting the growth of the Linux operating system.

We have tens of thousands machines running all types of services that run a tweaked version of Linux. One reason we support Linux is that open source development lets us control our destiny — we are able to innovate faster given the flexibility to customize based on our needs. We also love the large, stable and mature development community with whom we can collaborate to move the state of the kernel forward. If you look at the latest Linux Development Report, there are more than 7,800 developers from 800 different companies contributing to make Linux better for everyone.

We use a couple different kernel versions of Linux and tend to favor stability. As of today, we are mainly on the 2.6.39 kernel release. We tweak the kernel by adding some patches such as enhanced core dump functionality, UnionFS support and the ability to allow TCP congestion window to be set on a socket basis.

We expect to further customize the kernel to optimize it for our production environment and contribute some of the work upstream. If you’re interested in hacking on kernel performance at the scale of Twitter and participating in the Linux community, we’d love to hear from you and speak with you at LinuxCon this week.

And of course, we wish Linux a happy 21st birthday.

Posted by Chris Aniszczyk (@cra), Manager of Open Source