• Linus Torvalds's avatar
    Linux 0.10 (November 11, 1991 ???) · fa1ec100
    Linus Torvalds authored
    Likely correct 0.10: these were re-created from the RCS tree that Ted
    Ts'o had, no known pristine 0.10 tree (or, sadly, 0.02 and 0.03 trees)
    exist any more.
    
    Linux-0.10 was actually a major step.  It was _almost_ able to host
    itself, and if I remember correctly, a small patch I posted to the
    newsgroup a few days later got the buffer cache handling stable enough
    that Linux could now compile itself under itself without running out of
    memory due to a memory leak.
    
    Apart from bugfixes, the major update here is the support for
    mount/umount.  But you can also tell that others are starting to test
    out this thing, since the harddisk geometry is now auto-sensed, and we
    support the US keyboard layout in addition to the Finnish one.
    
    (This is also the first actual thing from the outside: the US keyboard
    layout tables came from Alfred Leung, although with major editing by me.)
    
     - add copyright messages ("(C) 1991  Linus Torvalds")
    
       Nobody else is really doing coding (yet..) but clearly I'm starting
       to be a lot more aware of other people here.
    
     - split up boot/boot.s into boot/bootsect.s and boot/setup.s
     - autodetect floppy type for booting
     - make root device and boot device configurable
    
     - support up to 16MB of physical memory (instead of just 8MB ;)
    
       Whee. We're clearly moving into the "big iron" phase of Linux.
    
     - move drivers around.  We now have separate subdirectories for
       character device drivers (tty and memory) and block device drivers.
    
     - initial floppy driver support!
    
       You can see how the "block layer" interfaces evolved directly from
       moving parts of the original hd.c driver into ll_rw_block.c and
       making them "generic".
    
     - make file reading do simple read-ahead
     - make file writing avoid reading in blocks that are totally overwritten
     - add support for /dev/port and /dev/null (!!)
     - improve pipe throughput
    
     - add support for sigaction(), not just old-style signal()
    
       This also rewrites most of the signal code in C rather than assembly.
    
     - add "mknod()" and "mount()"/"umount()" system calls, and support
       for traversing over mount-points.
    
     - add "sessions" and setsid(), so that we get proper SIGHUP's
    fa1ec100
exit.c,v 4.94 KB