We perform a Poiseuille flow in a channel linear stability analysis of a inserted with one porous layer in the centre, and focus mainly on the effect of porous filling ratio. The spectral collocation technique is adopted to solve the coupled linear stability problem. We investigate the effect of permeability, σ, with fixed porous filling ratio ψ = 1/3 and then the effect of change in porous filling ratio. As shown in the paper, with increasing σ, almost each eigenvalue on the upper left branch has two subbranches at ψ = 1/3. The channel flow with one porous layer inserted at its middle （ψ = 1/3） is more stable than the structure of two porous layers at upper and bottom walls with the same parameters. By decreasing the filling ratio ψ, the modes on the upper left branch are almost in pairs and move in opposite directions, especially one of the two unstable modes moves back to a stable mode, while the other becomes more instable. It is concluded that there are at most two unstable modes with decreasing filling ratio ψ. By analyzing the relation between ψ and the maximum imaginary part of the streamwise phase speed, Cimax, we find that increasing Re has a destabilizing effect and the effect is more obvious for small Re, where ψ a remarkable drop in Cimax can be observed. The most unstable mode is more sensitive at small filling ratio ψ, and decreasing ψ can not always increase the linear stability. There is a maximum value of Cimax which appears at a small porous filling ratio when Re is larger than 2 000. And the value of filling ratio 0 corresponding to the maximum value of Cimax in the most unstable state is increased with in- creasing Re. There is a critical value of porous filling ratio （= 0.24） for Re = 500; the structure will become stable as ψ grows to surpass the threshold of 0.24; When porous filling ratio ψ increases from 0.4 to 0.6, there is hardly any changes in the values of Cimax. We have also observed that the critical Reynolds number is especially sensitive for small ψ where t
