• Linus Torvalds's avatar
    [PATCH] Linux-0.96-pre (April 21, 1992) · d1e6fdb2
    Linus Torvalds authored
    More VFS layer work: remove more special cases, and take advantage of
    the virtual VFS functions (close and select).  Add fchown/fchgrp and
    [f]truncate.
    
    Orest Zborowski shows up, and works on porting X11 to X.  This needs a
    lot of infrastructure support: ioperm() for user-mode IO port access,
    and SVR style virtual terminal ioctl's to make porting easier.  Perhaps
    more importantly, the mmap() system call shows up, even if it right now
    is limited only to a direct /dev/mem remapping.
    
    [Original changelog below]
    
    - truncate/ftruncate/fchmod/fchown system calls
    
            note that there aren't any library functions for these, so they
            aren't very useful yet...
    
            [f]truncate needed a change in the logic of the internal
            truncate VFS call - anybody that has any nonstandard filesystem
            probably needs to look it up.
    
    - io-bitmap syscalls giving root-processes access to selected io ports
      from user space.  There is a "ioperm()" system call that lets the
      process select which ports it wants to enable/disable (all ports
      disabled as default) as well as a (standard sysv?) ioctl interface
      that X uses.
    
            again, no library stubs, but it allows things like reading and
            setting the cmos clock without using /dev/port, as well as
            control over the VGA registers...
    
    - mmap for /dev/mem
    
            more things needed for X...
    
    - the signal-handling fixes needed for gdb
    
            These aren't yet complete: serial lines still send signals under
            interrupts that can result in problems (ie ptrace doesn't
            correctly get them), but that's pretty unlikely (and will be
            fixed in the final 0.96).  Breakpoints should work etc..
    
    - multiple shared libraries
    
            Up to 6 simultaneous shared libraries/process: the patches were
            originally by pmacdona, but they were heavily changed by me, and
            I think they work in a more natural manner now.  One user-level
            change is that the libraries are now checked for read and
            execute permissions for safety-reasons.
    
    - cleaned up special files.
    
            read/write/ioctl no longer has special-case code: it is all
            handled with tables to functions.  This will mean that the SCSI
            patches won't patch in quite cleanly into 0.96: you'll need to
            add the code that sets up the functions.
    
            Again: device drivers and vfs-filesystem hackers need to look
            into the changes, although they are pretty logical (earlier
            versions just didn't implement all the vfs-routines)
    
            Note that the vfs-code for select is still not used: select is
            hardcoded for the devices it supports right now.
    
    - ptrace() has a new interface
    
            as gdb for versions < 0.95c don't work on the new version, and
            gdb won't work very well at all on 0.95c[+], there was no reason
            not to break ptrace.  Thus 0.96 has a new calling convention for
            ptrace, and the old ptrace library function no longer works.
            I'm including the new ptrace library function at the end of this
            post.
    
    - mount() takes 4 arguments, and checks that only the super-user can
      mount/umount things.
    
            Happily this shouldn't break any old binaries.
    
    - some general cleanups
    d1e6fdb2
ramdisk.c 3.03 KB