Ext filesystem support! The VFS layer switchover was successful.
Ext support is a more FFS-like filesystem, although still quite heavily
influenced by my original Minix filesystem.  But it allows much bigger
filesystems (minixfs was limited to 64MB) and many more files (minixfs
had a 16-bit inode number).

Named pipes by Paul Hargrove (using the regular pipe code for actual IO).

[original announcement below]

0.96c is actually what I called patch3 earlier this week, but as the new
features were pretty big and the cdiff's are probably going to be bigger
than the normal patches, I decided I might as well make it a totally new
minor release and make a bootimage and complete source available.

0.96c contains:
 - bugfixes (tty, console driver, pty's, sockets)
 - fifo's (names pipes - Paul Hargrove & editing by me)
 - the alpha extended filesystem (Remy Card)
 - st_blocks implemented (ie du, ls give reasonable if not exact values
   for disk-space used)
 - Makefile cleanups and warnings at compile-time removed

Note that while the extended filesystem code is there, and this kernel
successfully mounts and uses the new filesystem (with long filenames and
>64MB partitions), it's still under testing: I haven't made the mkefs
program available, and the extended filesystem features shouldn't be
used for other than testing right now.

Some of the changes are just cleanups: most of the warnings when
compiling the new kernel should be gone (not counting the scsi code
which is still the old non-cleaned-up version), and the make'ing of the
kernel is more logical now.

The bugfixes include the corrected console.c driver, the socket
corrections (without which X sometimes locks up), some pty semantics
corrections (although I'm still not certain it's correct) and some
editing in the general tty driver (including fixing the bug introduced
in 0.96b.pl2 that caused a reboot with uninitialized tty devices).

While the extended filesystem support isn't "official" yet, I can
happily report that my limited testing hasn't found any problems with
long filenames etc.  It still needs a fsck program, but 1.0 looks like a
real possibility soon.

                Linus