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Original Changelog:

CHANGES since 0.99 patchlevel 13:

 - new kernel source layout: drivers separated
 - lots of networking bugs fixed, and new network card drivers (Alan Cox,
   Donald Becker &co)
 - sound driver added to the default source distribution (Hannu
   Savolainen)
 - updated SCSI driver code (Eric Youngdale, Drew Eckhardt &co)
 - readonly OS/2 filesystem support (HPFS) added (Chris Smith)
 - NTP support (Philip Gladstone, Torsten Duwe, ??)
 - fixed 16MB swap-area limit
 - lots of minor cleanups, buxfixes etc.

We get enable_irq()/disable_irq()

The C++ experiment is not going well.  Get rid of the 'extern "C"', but
replace it with an "asmlinkage" #define that allows us to experiment.

ELF binary support it a notable change.

Original ChangeLog:

 - the bad memory management one-liner bug in pl12 is naturally fixed.
 - compiled with plain C by default instead of C++
 - ELF binary support (Eric Youngdale)
 - Quickport mouse support (and some changes to the PS/2 mouse driver)
   by Johan Myreen and co)
 - core file name change ("core" -> "core.xxxx" where xxxx is the name
   of the program that dumped code).  Idea from ???.  Also, core-files
   now correctly truncate any existing core file before being written.
 - some mmap() fixes: better error returns, and handling of non-fixed
   maps for /dev/mem etc.
 - one kludgy way to fix the wrong arp packets that have plagued net-2d
   (resulting in arp packets that had the first four bytes of the
   ethernet address as the IP address).
 - I fixed the mount-point handling of 'rename()' and 'unlink()/rmdir()'
   so that they should now work and/or give appropriate error messages.
   An early version of this patch was already sent to the KERNEL
   channel, which fixed the rename problem but not a similar bug with
   unlink.
 - packet mode fixes by Charles Hedrick.  Sadly, these are likely to
   break old telnet/rlogin binaries, but it had to be done in order to
   communicate correctly with the rest of the world.
 - FPU emulator patches from Bill Metzenthen.  The fprem1 insn should be
   correct now (not that anybody seems to have seen the incorrect
   behaviour..)
 - a few fixes for SCSI (Drew and Eric)
 - signal.c changes to handle multiple segments (for Wine) correctly.
 - updated drivers from Donald Becker: 3c509 and AT1500 drivers, but
   also some other drivers have been edited, and some networking fixes.

I hate to put out patches this soon after a release, but there is one
potentially major problem in pl12 which is very simple to fix..  I'm
including patches: both in plain ascii and as a uuencoded gzip file
(it's the same patch - the uuencoded one is in case there is any
newsserver that messes up whitespace).

The main patch is just the change from __get_free_page(GFP_BUFFER) into
get_free_page(GFP_KERNEL), and the two minor patches just add checks
that actually enforce the read-only nature of current file mmap'ings so
that any program that tries to do a write mapping at least will be told
that it won't work.

I'd suggest anybody compiling pl12 should add at least the file_table.c
patch: thanks to Alexandre Julliard for noticing this one.

            Linus

CDU31A and MCD CD-ROM drivers.  Ahh, the bad old days of every sound
card manufacturer having their own CD interface.

Much nicer keymaps for keyboards.

Many more network drivers by Donald Becker for the improving NET-2 code.

Eric Youngdale makes executables and libraries use the new mmap()
functionality.  The old special-cased sharing goes away.  Hurray! This
also means that mmap gets a lot more testing.  It also means that NFS
has to be fixed to allow mmaps. Done.

"sys_modify_ldt()" appears, the extended DOS emulators want it.

Still using C++ to compile the kernel.

Original changelog:

 - The memory manager cleanup has continued, and seems to be mostly
   ready, as proven by the ease of adding mmap() over NFS with the new
   routines.  So yes, the pl12 kernel will demand-load your binaries
   over NFS, sharing code and clean data, as well as running shared
   libraries over NFS.  Memory management by Eric and me, while the NFS
   mmap code was written by Jon Tombs,

 - ** IMPORTANT **: The keyboard driver has been enhanced even further,
   and almost everything is completely re-mappable.  This means that
   there is a new version of 'loadkeys' and 'dumpkeys' that you must use
   with this kernel or you'll have problems.  The default keyboard is
   still the US mapping, but if you want to create your own mappings
   you'll have to load them with the new binaries.  Get the 'kbd.tar.gz'
   archive from the same place you get the kernel.

   The new keymappings allow things like function key string changes,
   remapping of the control keys, and freedom to remap any of the normal
   keyboard functions: including special features like rebooting,
   console switching etc.  The keyboard remapping code has been done
   mostly by Risto Kankkunen (Risto.Kankkunen@Helsinki.FI).

 - updated network drivers by Donald Becker

 - updated serial drivers - tytso@Athena.mit.edu

 - updated 387 emulation (Bill Metzenthen).  The updated emulator code
   has more exact trigonometric functions and improved exception
   handling.  It now behaves very much like a real 486, with only small
   changes (greater accuracy, slightly different denormal NaN handling
   etc - hard to detect the differences even if you are looking for
   them).

 - network timer fixes by Florian La Roche (much cleaned up net/inet/timer.c
   and some bad race-conditions fixed).

 - Scsi code updates by Eric Youngdale and others

 - Sony CDU-31A CDROM driver by Corey Minyard added to the standard
   kernel distribution.

 - The Mitsumi CDROM driver is now part of the standard kernel.  Driver
   by Martin Harriss with patches by stud11@cc4.kuleuven.ac.be (yes, he
   probably has a real name, but no, I haven't found it) and Jon Tombs.

 - various other minor patches (preliminary ldt support etc)

There is at least one known problem with 0.99pl11 - it's very minor and
will not lead to any real problems, but it's also very easy to fix,
so...

The problem is a one-liner oversight in kernel/fork.c (thanks to TjL for
noticing the symptoms - they aren't easy to see), which is fixed by the
following patch:

In fact, it's probably easiest to "apply" this patch by hand: just
change the "p->tss.fs = KERNEL_DS" in fork.c to "p->tss.fs = USER_DS"
and you should be fine.

            Linus

Real file mmap with page sharing in the VM code.  We don't do writable
shared mappings (and we won't do them for a _long_ time yet), but this
is a big step forward!

Note in the COPYING file that the GPL only covers the kernel, not user
programs. People were starting to find Linux more and more interesting..

Improved configure script.

Use nicer "save_flags()/cli()/restore_flags()" macros instead of
hardcoding the inline assembly.  Clean up other inline assembly usage
too.

Trying to compile the kernel with C++ compiler.  It will be a failed
experiment.

Original ChangeLog:

 - The keyboard is dynamically changeable (this is true of pl10 as
   well), and you need to get the "keytables.tar.z" archive to set the
   keyboard to suit your taske unless you want to live with the default
   US keymaps.

   Use the "loadkeys map/xxx.map" command to load the keyboard map: you
   can edit the maps to suit yourself if you can't find a suitable one.
   The syntax of the keyboard...

People finally gave up on net-1, Ross Biro grew tired of the flames, and
net-2 appears with Fred van Kempen as maintainer.  This is the big
switch-over version.

fsync() isn't just a stub any more, and System V IPC is also showing up.

The "struct file" filetable is made dynamic, instaed of a static
allocation.  For the first time you can have _lots_ of files open.

Stub for iBCS2 emulation code.

[original announcement below]

I've finally released an official version of linux-0.99 patchlevel 10:
there have been various alpha versions floating around which differ in
details (notably networking code), which shouldn't be used any more.
The new linux version is available only as full source code: the diffs
would have been too big to be useful.  You can find linux-0.99.10.tar.z
(along with keytables.tar.z) on nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus
and probably on tsx-11 and other linux archives within a day or two (so
check there first if you are in the states).

Linux-0.99 pl10 has a number of new features and changes in interface.
The most notable of these are:

 - the networking code is reorganized (generally called "net-2",
   although unrelated to the BSD release).  The new code implements a
   lot of standard features lacking in net-1, and also changes the user
   interface to be closer to the BSD standards.  Notably, the old
   configuration binaries won't work, so to get the new networking to
   work you'll have to get the net-2 binaries as well.  The networking
   binaries are available on tsx-11.mit.edu (and mirrors) under the
   directory pub/linux/packages/net/net-2 (and the setup syntax has
   changed somewhat..)

   The networking code has been mainly organized and rewritten by Fred
   van Kempen, with drivers by Donald Becker.

 - serial line setup has been changed: linux 0.99 pl10 does *not* try to
   autodetect serial ports very agressively.  If you have other serial
   ports than the standard com1/com2, or nonstandard IRQ etc values,
   this means that it's less likely to work without any help.  The
   solution is not to recompile the kernel - you should get the
   "setserial" program available from tsx-11.mit.edu in the directory
   pub/linux/sources/sbin/setserial-2.01.tar.z that allows you to
   dynamically configure your serial ports to suit your setup.

   The main organizer behind the serial line changes is tytso (Theodore
   Ts'o).

 - Keyboard setup has changed: it is no longer hardcoded at compile
   time, but instead you can use the new "loadkeys" program to load in a
   new keyboard map on the fly.  The default keyboard map is the normal
   US keyboard (yes, I should have used the Finnish one by default, but
   after thinking of all the problems that would have resulted in I
   forgot about that idea).  The loadkeys code can be found in the
   "keytables.tar.z" archive, which also contains keymaps for most
   normal keyboard types.  To create a custom keyboard table is very
   easy - just take a 5 minute look at the existing map files (they
   resemble the ones used by xmodmap, so if you are familiar with
   those..)

   The loadable keymaps were mostly implemented by Risto Kankkunen.

There are a lot of other internal kernel changes, but they should be
mostly transparent, and noticeable only indirectly due to new features
or (hopefully) better/faster/whatever operation.  These include:

 - the SysV IPC patches are in by default: Krishna Balasubramanian.
   If you need these, you know what it's about (notably, dosemu 0.49
   wants them).
 - inode handling is updated: inodes and files are now dynamically
   allocated within the kernel, and use a hash table for faster lookup
   (along with a NFU algorithm for the inode cache).  Steven Tweedie.
 - Updated FPU emulation: mostly exception handling changes, making the
   emulator handle most exceptions the same way a 486 does.  The
   emulator is written by Bill Metzenthen.
 - a few ext2-fs updates by Remy Card and Steven Tweedie.
 - support for the 'fsync()' function (Steven Tweedie)
 - various (minor) SCSI patches to catch some error conditions, add
   support for VLB adaptec controllers without DMA and so on (different
   people).
 - other changes - I forget.

In addition to patches sent in by others, I've naturally made my own
changes (often *to* the patches sent in by others :-).  Among other
things, the pl10 buffer cache code now also tries to share pages with
executables, resulting in better cacheing especially of binaries (giving
noticeable improvements in kernel recompilation speed on some machines).
Also, I've changed a lot of low-level things around to help the iBCS2
project: this includes things like internal segment handling and the
signal stack (which now looks the same as on SysV i386 unixes).  All in
all, pl10 has a disturbing amount of new code, but will hopefully work
well despite (due to?) the number of changes.

The new networking code in particular will change the network setup a
lot - it now looks more standard, but if you were used to the old way of
doing things..  On the other hand, most people actively using the
networking features have hopefully gotten warnings about this on the NET
channel for the last few weeks.  Also, the networking code still isn't
perfect: Fred is still working on it, but it seems to have reached a
reasonably stable platform on which it will be easier to build.  Look
out for the new-and-improved networking manual, hopefully out soon(?).

Standard request: please try it all out, give it a real shakedown, and
send comments/bug-reports to the appropriate place (I'm always
appropriate, but you may want to send the report to the mailing lists
and/or the newsgroup as well).  I apologize for the lateness of the
release (forcing hlu to make interim gcc releases that relied on
nonstandard kernels etc), and the changes are somewhat bigger than I'd
prefer, so the more testerts that try it out, the faster we can try to
fix any possible problems.  The new kernel has gone through various
stages of ALPHA-diffs and some late ALPHA-pl10's, so there shouldn't be
any major surprises, but alpha releases tend not to get even close to
the coverage a real release gets...

                    Linus

Bill's math emulator now passes paranoia.

Last argument to ioctl is "long".

sys_clone() appears.

[original announcement below]

The latest kernel release is 0.99.9, and can be found on nic.funet.fi:
pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus, both as patches relative to pl8 and as full
sources.  The only major new feature is that the ST-0x driver has
finally been updated to the scatter-gather code: ST-0x users should with
luck get about 5 times the performance on disk-operations..  Seagate
code written by Drew Eckhardt.

0.99.9 also fixes:
- the FPU-emulator should now handle all rounding-modes correctly, and
  pass all the paranoia package tests.  Patches by Bill Metzenthen.
- bootup enhancements by Chrisoph Niemann (but the SVGA mode numbers
  have changed, so you may have to edit your lilo configuration file
  and/or the main Makefile to get the mode you normally want)
- ext2fs updated to the very latest release.  Code by Remy Card and
  Stephen Tweedie.
- various minor patches,...

Mount root filesystem read-only (conditional for now).

SCSI updates.

Stephen Tweedie shows up in ext2, with an enhanced block allocator.

Signal handling update with generated code on the stack and a
"sigreturn" system call.  This was needed to maintain compatibility in
the face of a changed stack layout.  sigsuspend() also works correctly now.

[original announcement below]

Yet another kernel release is now available on nic.funet.fi in the usual
place (pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus for those of you that have already
forgotten), and will probably show up on the other ftp-sites within a
day or two.  There are two new files:

 linux-0.99.8.tar.z - the full gzipped and tarred source-tree of the
   linux kernel.

 linux-0.99.patch8.z - unified diffs against the last official release
   (0.99pl7).

There is no SLIP or new networking routines in this kernel despite the
rumors that have been flying around - the main changes to 0.99.7 are
(some of them were in 0.99pl7A as well)...

More net-1 work. It's endless.

XT harddisk support by Pat Mackinlay.

sys_fsync() and SysV IPC code sys_ipc() stubs appear.

[original announcement below]

I don't generally announce ALPHA-diffs to quite this large an audience,
but I'll be partying^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hunavailable for the rest of the
week, and it's unlikely that I will be able to check mails or the
newsgroups until the start of April.  As a result, I'm putting up my
latest kernel version for ftp as it fixes some things in 0.99.7.

The ALPHA-diffs can be found on nic.funet.fi: in the directory
pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus.  If you dislike patching, you can get the
full sources in "linux-0.99.7A.tar.z", or just get the diff file
"ALPHA-diff.z".

Changes in this release:
- the new kernel now detects the lock-up condition at startup if you
  have a faulty 386/387 coupling, and will use software floating point
  in that case.
- the Xia filesystem is updated to the latest version
- the DOS filesystem is updated to...

Nigel Gamble makes lp driver able to use interrupts.

The mmap() code is finally starting to really happen.  In particular,
this means that "verify_area()" is doing more - it can check the actual
areas that have been mapped, rather than just blindly assume that the
user can access anything in the first 3GB.

For now, the mmap code only does anonymous mappings and /dev/mem.
Executables are still read into memory.  But the infrastructure is
there.

The VFS layer stops using names directly in user space - the race
conditions were just too hard to handle.  So pathnames are copied into
kernel space before they are looked up.

Ext2fs (Remy Card) and xiafs (Frank Xia) are merged.  Both are much
faster filesystems using bitmaps rather than freelists, and can handle
big disks and big files.

Ext2fs is based on extfs, while xiafs is a simpler straightforward
extension of the old minixfs.

Xiafs obviously was eventually dropped.

[Original announcement below]

It has been two we...

Merge a lot of duplicated special file handling into fs/devices.c, and
make drivers register their major numbers properly.

VFS layer gets fsync virtual function.

Compressed image boot, with the kernel loaded into high memory..

[original announcement below]

I'm starting soon to run out of patchlevel numbers for 0.99, but I made
a new release anyway (and long-time linux hackers remember my less than
completely logical numbering: when I run out of numbers I'll start using
alphabetical characters and other fun characters to indicate new
versions :-)

0.99pl6 is mainly a syncronization release: it fixes a few bugs and
changes the behaviour of 'vhangup()' to be more standard.  The vhangup()
changes will break some init/login stuff that depended on the earlier
incorrect behaviour - not everybody may want to use pl6 until you are
sure your init/login will work happily with it.  Better do these things
before 1.0 than to break it later.

Patchlevel 6 also changes the vfs...

net-1: more fixes, use bottom halves for transmitting, more "volatiles"
to hide bugs. /proc interfaces for networking.

Side note: it took networking a _long_ time to recover from the
volatiles.  Getting the locking right rather than trying to make the
compiler make races smaller was a hard idea to get through.

Bill Metzenthen moves his math emulator to "beta 1.0" status.

Fred van Kempen shows up: starting to do a SLIP line discipline for tty
devices.

Verify FP exception handling.

[Original announcement below]

        "He's done it yet again - doesn't he ever rest?"
                        - anonymous linux kernel hacker

Only complete newbies don't know what this is all about, but I'd better
tell you anyway: patchlevel 5 of the 0.99 kernel is now available on
nic.funet.fi (pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus) as both context diffs against
pl4 and complete source code.  I'm not even going to speculate on 1.0
right now.

The pl5 diffs are about 90kB compressed: the major ...

net-1: random addition of "volatile" keywords to try to hide race
conditions in the code.

File locking updated with shared and exclusive locks for BSD flock.

Re-mounting of filesystems and new mount system call.

Re: Freeze up on X

In article <1993Jan21.181502.23485@miles.com> dennisf@miles.com (Dennis Flaherty) writes:
>
>Here's another clue.  Try this: when your system freezes, running X, try
>MOVING THE MOUSE.  It's weird!!  But moving the mouse actually makes the
>system run!  Stop moving the mouse, and the system freezes again.  And
>this only happens with 0.99.3, not 0.99.2.

Get pl4, and it should be gone.  There was a bug in the handling of
uninitialized interrupts in pl3, where they could result in either the
wrong interrupt mask being loaded leading to interrupt lock-out or (in
some cases) bit corruption at the user level.  The symptoms are exactly
as you describe: a good interrupt that didn't happen to be locked out
will correct the interrupt mask, and...

VFS gets "permission()" virtual function.

[Original announcement below]

Still no 1.0 - I have had a couple of reports of problems, so I'll make
yet another 0.99 release.  The diffs (against 0.99.2) and complete
source can be found at nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus as usual,
and will probably show up at the other sites pretty soon.

0.99.3 contains no real new features, but the diffs are pretty big
anyway (100kB+ compressed): various things have moved around a bit and
there are a lot of minor changes.  The changes include (but are not
limited to):

 - the math emulator code now also understands the unofficial codes (in
   case somebody followed the ML math emulator thread).  I'd be
   interested to hear whether ML now works with the emulator.
 - various SCSI driver changes
 - some re-organization of the tty open/close code to remove a few race
   conditions.
 - interrupt handling rewrites (two-level interrupt code cleanups)
 - the serial drivers are tytso's alpha-drivers: they aren't quite
   completed, but as they need the interrupt handling patches to get
   ready, this is probably the least traumatic way of doing it.
 - some more minor keyboard driver changes (mostly taking advantage of
   the two-level interrupts)

+ a lot of other minor changes.  I once more hope people will try it
out, and report any problems or successes to me.

Known problems:
 - there seems to be something weird going on in the ST-0x driver with
   some scsi disks.
 - tcp/ip is reportedly still not quite stable, and I can't even test it
   out.

NOTE! The DMA functions have changed for the high DMA channels - all DMA
functions now take their arguments as the number of bytes instead of the
old way of using bytes for ch 0-3 and words for ch 5-7.  This might lead
to problems with the SoundBlaster driver, which may need editing.

                Linus

Bottom half race condition fix.

Return ENODEV for nonexistent special devices.

Fix Unix domain sockets to properly check for target equality.

Add 'wchan' to /proc/stat

[Original announcement below]

Yes, as you've probably noticed, it's now 1993 and I still haven't
released 1.0.  Sorry about that, and I have only another patchlevel to
offer.  The new kernel should mainly fix some of the keyboard problems
people have experienced, but does contain some other minor fixes.

Linux 0.99.2 is available now at nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus
as both sources and diffs against 0.99.1 the diffs are essentially the
same as the second alpha-diffs I released for limited testing, with only
minor fixes to fs/exec.c and fs/open.c.

Please try out 0.99.2: the more feedback (hopefully positive) I get on
it, the faster 1.0 will be out.

Changes from pl1 are mainly:
 - pretty much rewritten low-level keyboard handling IO - this time
   actually trying to do it by the book.  I...

Patch 1 addresses the following problems:
 - configuration. Hope there are no silly problems left..
 - inode.c: initialization changes (the missing NULL and some other
   minor fixes).
 - some SCSI tape driver patches (Kai M{kisara)
 - tcp/ip patches (Ross Biro, some code by me)
 - keyboard patches (mainly changed initialization - hope the keyboard
   lockups are gone).
 - completed /proc-fs: it should now contain all info needed by 'ps'
   (Micheal K Johnson).
 - various minor fixes (the minix-fs link overflow checking etc)

Patch1 also contains support for extended VC switching - this is for the
upcoming X11 that understands VC's.  One result of this is that console
redirection now redirects *only* messages actually sent to /dev/console
(aka /dev/tty0), not just to any foreground VC.  Wait for Xfree-1.2 to
be able to switch VC's while under X (yes, including several X-sessions
active at the same time..).

I hope there are still people out there that aren't too bu...

net-1: paranoid queue checking to find more bugs.

configuration script version #1.

NFS filesystem client support by Rick Sladkey!

[Original announcement below]

0.99 has no major new features: the NFS client code is now in the
standard distribution, and the kernel configuration has changed, but
most of the rest of the changes are fixes - especially the tcp code
should now be pretty stable (knock wood).

Changes:

 - NFS is in. As are some stubs for the soud drivers, although it's only
   stubs right now.
 - various fixes around the place: the serial problems are hopefully
   gone, and there are patches to both TCP/IP and SCSI to make them more
   stable.
 - Minor fixes: the keyboard buglet introduced in 0.98pl6 should be
   gone, and some other bugs are also corrected.  The optimized
   read-ahead code in the filesystems (and the raw device read code) was
   too complicated and seemed to have problems with bad blocks, so I
   rewrote it, and it should hopefully wo...

Kai Makisara does the SCSI tape driver.  He's one of the few original
maintainers still around as such..

isofs introduced by Eric Youngdale, based on the minixfs code.  Eric was
a physicist, and you can tell he was new to C - he has been
Pascal-damaged, and has extra semi-colons at the end of block
statements.  But soon he ended up being one of the core maintainers
anyway, and took over SCSI maintenance.

More aggressive filesystem read-ahead introduced.

[Original announcement below]

Anyway, 0.98pl6 is hopefully the last release before 0.99: there are a
few known problems left in this release.  Most notable is the serial
code: it works for most people, but others still have problems with it.
I hope this will get fixed within a week (tytso is working on it).  It
also seems as if the PS/2 mouse code has some problems.

pl6 contains these fixes:

 - all the tcp/ip patches I've received (and I fixed one bug that
   gcc-2.3 seems to have found).
 - math-emu patch for the problem that resulted in FPU errors with some
   operations.
 - I fixed gcc-2.3 warnings as well as most of the old warnings.  You
   shouldn't get more than one or two warnings when recompiling the
   whole kernel.
 - /proc filesystem extensions.  Based on ideas (and some code) by
   Darren Senn, but mostly written by yours truly.  More about that
   later.
 - some tty_io fixes (there was a bug in the /dev/console handling when
   you changed VC's while using the general console device).
 - re-organization of the keyboard-driver internal data-structures.  The
   changes are mostly preliminary: they change the keyboard flags to be
   more easily adaptive to a reprogrammable keyboard driver.  No actual
   new features yet.
 - new SCSI drivers: reportedly much faster than the old ones (but not
   all drivers take advantage of it yet..)
 - various other fixes: pty's etc have minor changes.

I hope to make 0.99 in a week or so, and 1.0 after that has been tested
some.  I hope people will test out pl6 - 0.99 won't be much different,
and if you don't test pl6, any bugs relating to your particular hardware
may not be found in time for 0.99...

                Linus

net-1: free_skb -> kfree_skb. More changelogs.

[Original announcement below]

0.98.5 mainly fixes the swap-partition bug that was present in pl4 (and
for which I did an earlier unofficial emergency patch).  The bug
resulted in incorrect swapping with a partition under some circumstances
(notably tty events: keypresses could make xterm dump code when swapping
was enabled etc).

pl5 also has some other changes - nothing major.  Setting and querying
termios information from a pty master will now set/query the slave info:
this seems to be what some programs (telnet) expect.  I haven't seen any
changes to any of the programs I use, but I'd like to hear if this
results in problems or if it actually does help.

NOTE! READ THIS AND PONDER:

pl5 now checks against writing to the text segment.  Older binaries
which used the original estdio library (used with the earliest gcc
versions) are liable to break: not that there should be many of these
binaries around.  So if you get "Segmentation fault (core dumped)" on
binaries you know used to work, this is the likely cause.

One problem spot that I've seen even with new binaries is due to a
library bug in 'sigaction()'.  If the second argument is NULL (ie the
pointer to the new sigaction structure), sigaction() will incorrectly
dereference it resulting in a core-dump.  The only program so far that
I've seen doing this is 'dd', but there may be others.

On my system I have found a whopping total of two binaries which didn't
like the text segment protection, so it shouldn't really be a major
problem for anybody.  Famous last words.

                Linus

PS. The strace code in pl4 was incorrectly credited in the announcement.
The code was written by Branko Lankester, not Ross Biro (who did the
tcp/ip changes).

Rename "malloc()/free()" as "kmalloc()/kfree()" to make people more
aware of some of the limitations.

Math emulator updates to handle the case that Linux (unlike the original
djgpp target) can get preempted by user space accesses.

Make "ll_rw_blk()" take an array of blocks to read/write.

VFS "notify_change()" callback, to allow the low-level filesystem to
decide what it wants to do about metadata changes.

Deprecate old "stat()" call by printing out a warning on use.

NR_OPEN is now 256 files per process, and the old "unsigned long" bitops
needed to go away. This causes lots of syntactic changes in select().

System call tracing implemented for ptrace().

[Original announcement below]

 - the inode caching bug (resulting in bad filesystem info when
   mounting/umounting devices) should be gone for good.

 - an elusive race-condition in the fs is fixed: this may have been the
   reason some people got fsck errors once in a while.  The
   race-condition was pretty ...

More networking updates.. Ross Biro is still struggling with net-1.

Michael Johnson (now RH kernel release manager) works on line printer
driver.

Locking function cleanups (for inodes, superblocks, buffer heads).  We
also now pass in the superblock pointer instead of the device number to
the filesystem routines.  That cleans up use and locking of
"get_super()" a lot.

[Original announcement below]

Ok, I already sent out an announcement last night, but due to the time
(6AM over here) I wasn't really in a mood to write a real annoucement.
Here it is.

linux-0.98.3 is available by anonymous ftp at least on nic.funet.fi:
pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus, both as context diffs against 0.98.2 and the
pre-version of 0.98.3 and as complete source. The complete source
package was done by directly applying the diffs - this means that the
Makefile dependancies are probably not 100% up-to-date as I remove those
from the diffs. It shouldn't be any problem, and you can always do a
"...

Start virtualizing real mmap() functionlity in the kernel.  The first
signs of me thinking about this already showed up as some unused header
files earlier, this fleshes things out some more.  No actual filesystem
code yet..

This also removes my old simple math emulator, and introduces the new
and much improved one from Bill Metzenthen.

Bill originally wrote it for the djgpp suite (DJ Delories gcc port to
DOS extenders).  It was much more accurate and well designed than my
hackish one, and I was happy to throw my old code away.  The new math
emulator also did things that I had never bothered with, notably the
more complex i387 functions (exponentials and trig).

I also fixed the static maximum memory limit: we now generate the kernel
page tables dynamically rather than having a 16M or 32M static limit.

SCSI updates: removable media support (which also implies re-reading the
partition table etc)

[Original announcement below]

patch-2 is >150kB compressed, as it c...

Add ATI XL busmouse driver by Bob Harris, split off MS busmouse driver into
a driver of its own (rather than a subdriver of the Logitech mouse driver)

FAT uid/gid/umask mount options.

SCSI driver updates.

[Original announcement below]

Patch1 to 0.98 mainly corrects some driver problems: it contains the
added "inb_p(HD_STATUS)" for hd.c, as well as a changed mouse driver
setup (hope it works - I couldn't test it..).  There are also some SCSI
driver patches: the seagate driver uses irqaction() to get irq's, and
the aha1542 driver has the speedup patches.

The bootimage should be compiled without the auto-SVGA mode, so people
who had problems with linux automatically using a SVGA mode should be ok
in this release.

                Linus

Real networking (TCP) merged! This is the now-called "net-1" code by
Ross Biro.  Boy, was it ugly, but it made for a big jump from not having
any at all.

(And add support for up the 32MB of memory ;)

[Original announcement below]

Sorry for being late - I can't even show any great new features in 0.98,
but at least it's out now, and available at the normal place (ie at
nic.funet.fi, pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus).  So far there is only a
full-source version available, although I'll probably make it available
as a patch too tomorrow or so (but the patch won't contain the tcp/ip
stuff).

0.98 is essentially the same as 0.97.pl6 - the changes are mostly:
 - tcp/ip (0.8.1) is in.  It's not compiled into the standard bootimage,
   and you'd better be on the tcpip mailing-list to use it, but it's
   there. I've been unable to test it further than just watch it
   compile...
 - extfs patch to correct the problem with big directories with holes.
 - mouse patches (ie improved detection-routines)
 - minor scsi patches (ultrastor driver change)
 - swiss keyboard
 - some serial driver patches
 - the 32mb patches are in, so if you aren't using a DMA-SCSI driver,
   and have more than 16MB physical memory, you can get it recognized.
 - edited hd.c
 - corrected core-dumping routines

I didn't get my mm patches working yet, so they'll have to wait.  The
above are almost 100% by others - I have edited some of the patches, but
there is nothing major new by me.  Most of it is minor bug-fixes, and
the only thing that might be a bit of a problem are the hd.c changes:
but I hope they'll solve more problems than they cause.  Knock wood.

At nic.funet.fi you can currently find (a) the full sources (b) a
bootimage (US keyboard, floppy root, no tcp/ip) and (c) the protocols.h
file needed for compiling the tcp/ip directory (which should go into
/usr/include/netinet/).  I hope people try it out, and that there are no
new problems with this release.

                Linus

Ted Ts'o did extensive serial driver changes, and fixed up some of the
tty layer to match.  Tty's now allocated dynamically.

[Original announcement below]

This patch does not contain any major bug-fixes: it corrects named pipes
that broke with pl5, and has some minor changes in the IO-instructions
and the hd-driver, but those shouldn't matter for most of you.

It does contain all the scsi-patches that I've gotten so far, so if the
bootup sequence died on you in the scsi code, pl6 should correct this.

The major part of the patch is tytso's serial line changes, making the
tty structures dynamic.  No more NR_PTY's - the number of pty's is now
bounded only by the minor number setup (max 64 pty's) or the amount of
memory available (opening a pty requires a page of memory for tty
queues).  Similarly for serial lines.

The above just means that while pl6 can be useful, the changes to pl5
aren't big enough to worry about.  Most people don't use named pipes, it
seems, a...

SCSI CD-ROM support by David Giller (based on sd.c by Drew)

Microsoft Busmouse support by Teemu Rantanen

Do the same buffer cleanups to extfs that we just did to Minixfs.

Efficient VGA emulation in dosemu wanted to know when we write
to the pseudo-VGA memory area. Add vm86 mode hooks for that.

[Original announcement below]

Patch 5 fixes the extended filesystem problems (thanks to Remy Card), as
well as including many smaller fixes (some more fs cleanups, the CDROM
patches and several other minor changes).  Pl5 finally removes even the
last few header-files that were incompatible with the normal headers, so
the "-nostdinc -I$(KERNELHDRS)" stuff is gone.

Patch 5 should also fix the problems with iopl() that resulted in the
X8514-server having problems with 0.97.pl2 and above.

In case people are wondering, my schedule for 1.0 looks something like
this:

 - 0.98 out in about a week: this is essentially 0.97.5 + the tcp/ip
   directory, as well as any fixes that may come up.  I'll try to get
   the loadable driver interface into it too.

 - 0.99 out after 0.98 has been shaken down: a month or so.

 - 1.0 will be the same as 0.99: the only changes will be eventual
   trivial bug-fixes in case 0.99 has some problems.  This is just to
   try to get over the "X.0" bug syndrome.

There are a few on-going projects: depending on circumstances these will
be implemented sooner or later, so I won't give any promises.  These
include: loadable drivers/fs's (alpha-patches already availabla), full
support for different block-sizes (some work still required), and a
extensive rewrite of the mm routines (I'll want to make a vmm interface
similar to the vfs interface for the filesystem routines).

                Linus

Linus "dances with patches" Torvalds strikes again: I've already made
patchlevel 4 of 0.97.  It may not be a new record, but it's close :-)

Patch 4 is a very minor patch, but it's pretty important if you want a
stable filesystem (and let's face it: most people seem to prefer a
filesystem that stays up a bit longer).  While patch3 corrected most of
the race-conditions in the minix fs, I overlooked the [f]truncate system
calls, and this new patch corrects that.

[f]truncate is a very race-prone function, and as if that wasn't enough,
there was also a pretty bad error in truncate.c that resulted in the
indirect blocks not being correctly marked dirty when doing partial
truncates.  The latter problem is probably the reason for most of the
filesystem corruptions that have been reported - the race-conditions
were a lot harder to fix, but they also happen a lot less often.

Note that the [f]truncate bug isn't new: it has been in the kernel since
[f]truncate was first implemented (0.95?).  But until now, [f]truncate()
hasn't actually been used very much - only the latest versions of the
binutils have used ftruncate to strip binaries etc.  So the problem
hasn't shown up that much.

So while I consider patch4 to be crucial, you /can/ actually live
without it: I haven't seen the buffer corruption problem at all (until I
actually tested for it after getting good bug-reports), so you can
provably miss it for a long time.  But if you have ever had corruption
problems, I'd suggest upgrading to pl4 as soon as possible.

The corruption problems show up most clearly when using a new "strip"
binary, although they are theoretically possible with other programs
too.  Thanks to "obz@raster.kodak.com" and "jon@robots.ox.ac.uk" for
good bug-reports: thanks to them I was able to pin down the error to
truncate.c, and after that it was pretty easy to get rid of it.

Also note that this patch still hasn't fixed the extended filesystem: I
suspect the same bugs lurk around there.  I'll get it corrected by 0.98
at the latest.

The patch is included at the end of this post (it's very minor - it
contains patches mainly against linux/fs/minix/truncate.c) , and I'll
also update nic.funet.fi (pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus) to have the new
sources.  Sorry for the inconvenience,

                Linus

Hey, we switched to the GPL several months ago, but only now do we
include the license text itself.  Apparently everybody expected
everybody else to just know what the GPL was..

Add a README on compiling the kernel (by Lasu)

Add PS/2 mouse driver, make generic "mouse" infrastructure.

Add /proc filesystem, clean up minixfs block mapping.

sys_wait4() and swapoff().

VM gets a "secondary page free" list for things like interrupts
that want a page _now_ and can't wait for the regular free list
to fill up.

[Original announcement below]

Patch3 is almost 100kB even compressed, as there were quite big changes
in the mm and minix fs.  No major new features: there are two new system
calls: swapoff(const char * swapfile) and wait4(), and linux accepts
several swap-files, but the rest of the thing is mostly bug-fixes or
simply rewrites.

Major changes:
 - new swap-page handling: linux no longer uses just one bit to keep
   track of used swap-space, but a counter for each swap-page.  This
   allows processes to share swap-pages after a fork(), and should
   result in /major/ performance increases on machines with less memory.
   I've seen better performance even with 8MB - I wouldn't be surprised
   if 4MB machines would re-compile the kernel noticeably faster under
   pl3.  I'd be interested to hear numbers.
 - The low 1MB memory that isn't used directly by the kernel is now
   swappable memory, instead of being hardcoded for buffer cache.  The
   patches for this were originally by tytso, and I expanded on it a bit
   more.  This might also help better performance on 2-4MB machines.
   Note that this does /not/ mean that you can use 1M machines for
   linux: linux still needs some extended memory.
 - the dosfs has been upgraded to dosfs.8 - patches by almesber.
 - I edited the minix fs pretty heavily to remove a couple of race-
   conditions.  The same races still exist in the extended fs, as I
   didn't have time to edit that yet.  The minix-fs took precedence as I
   know that better, and extfs isn't "official" yet anyway.

other changes:

 - the mouse-driver now handles both Logitech (minor = 0) and PS/2
   (minor = 1) busmice.
 - there is a proc-fs for access to user memory/files etc.
 - better support for the tcp/ip patches (but see below...)
 - corrected symlink and /dev/[k]mem behaviour
 - Lars Wirzenius' README (with minimal comments by me) and the GNU
   COPYING notice are now part of the normal kernel setup, and can be
   found in the tar-archive.
 - the floppy ioctl() to get the FD parameters no longer requires root
   priviledges.  Thus, the msdos emulator runs even for a normal user.

Some comments on patchlevel 3:

        mm:

The swap-page handling resulted in a reduction of swap-file (or
partition) size to a maximum of 16MB per file.  It's nothing inherent to
the code, but it eased some algorithms, so I didn't bother coding around
it.  After all, 16MB is enough for most people, and if you want more,
you can have up to 128 swapfiles of 16MB each.  If I get enough
hate-mail about it, I might just try to find the energy to correct it.
Maybe.

Bigger swapfiles will still work, but linux will take advantage of only
the low 16MB.  Also, there is no nifty logic to try to optimize the
usage of the swap-files: pages are simply allocated from one swap-file
until it fills up, and then the next swap-file is used.

The memory management changes break ps/free once more, but not very
much.  Also, I changed the load-average counting, so 'w' also needs
slight editing.  On the other hand, I made '/dev/kmem' mmap()able, and
'ps' and 'free' should be edited to take advantage of that: it should
result in much faster operation, as well as possibly using less real
memory.

        fs:

The fs changes should remove at least two races - the races don't happen
very often, but they were theoretically possible, and might be the
reason for some fs corruption problems that have been reported.  The
changes are related to the use of bmap() - the bmap interface doesn't
really lend itself to some things that it was used for.  Re-writing
internal fs-functions not to use bmap not only should have removed any
races, but also actually resulted in cleaner code.

The proc-fs code isn't too beautiful, and I'll probably leave it out
from 0.98 unless I can make it loadable.  We'll see.  If anybody wants
to use it, you can do something like

  # mount -t proc /dev/ram /proc

Instead of /dev/ram you can use any block device - it's not used, and is
only a dummy as the proc-fs doesn't actually use any external device.
(but note that the device is still marked as mounted, so you cannot
mount it for anything else).

        kernel/mm/lib:

The TCP/IP patches are also essentially in 0.97.pl3 - not the full
TCP/IP directory, only the patches to the main kernel.  NOTE!! I don't
like the 'grab_malloc_pages()' function, so I left that out, and added a
GFP_ATOMIC priority to get_free_page() that should be used instead.  I
hope this will be used (Ross?), as it's a lot cleaner.

Also, I hope the tcp/ip people will clean up malloc() so that it doesn't
panic instead of returning NULL etc.  Ugly, ugly.  This is related to
the get_free_page(GFP_ATOMIC) changes, and I'd like to have patches as
soon as possible - tcp/ip won't be part of the standard kernel until
that can be cleaned up.

                Linus

We're making ready for big processes, and vm86 mode!
 - Move the kernel to virtual address 0xc0000000 instead of zero.
 - Allocate per-process page tables

We can now have 3GB processes, and more than 64 of them!

[Original announcement below]

As promised, 0.97.pl2 is out today (well, over here it's already
tomorrow, so I guess I'm 35 minutes late.  Naughty, naughty).  Right
now, the patch (and full source for those that don't like to patch up
the system) is available at "nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus",
but I'll try to put it on some other sites as well if I'm able and
energetic enough.  Probably tomorrow - together with a binary for those
that aren't willing to comple the kernel on their own.

0.97.2 has mostly my mm/fs patches, along with some relatively minor
diffs by others (including file locking by Doug Evans).  User-level
changes are minor: but the mm has changed a lot, and the vfs routines
have been changed to keep track of the error-messages a bit better.
Also, the vfs-interface to "follow_link()" changed slightly: people who
are making filesystems should look at the changes (but they are
relatively minor, and shouldn't result in any problems - both the
extended fs and minix fs needed just a simple change in their respective
symlink.c files).

The mm changes /might/ lower performance slightly, as the paging TLB's
are now flushed at every task-switch due to the new system, but I doubt
it's noticeable.  The other performance changes (dynamic buffers etc) in
0.97(.pl1) should overshadow that particular problem.

I hope this release means that these kinds of low-level rewrites aren't
needed for a while: the last couple of releases have changed some very
fundamental things.  Nothing seems to have suffered too badly, but I'd
be happier if it all got tested more thoroughly.  Anyway, discounting
the ps/free etc suite of programs, everything I have tried has worked
flawlessly despite the big kernel changes.

I'm still worried about the reports about messed-up buffers, but have
been unable to reproduce the problem, and nobody has so far
disillusioned me about my guess that it's a problem with the SCSI code
(which at least gives me an excuse for not doing anything about it :-).
Other problems include at least one report of spontaneous re-booting,
which is totally inexplicable, so I'm blaming hardware once more until I
can get better data on the thing.

As to patches sent by others: 0.97.2 contains very little of that kind
of code.  I've been too busy either working, or implementing my own
changes that I have simply ignored them for the most part.  Remind me
(or resend them relative to the new kernel) if you have a patch that is
still needed.

There is one new system call: 'vm86(struct vm86_struct * info)'.  It's
not ready for general use yet - it works, but will probably need some
tweaking before being practical.  But supporting a virtual 86 mode was
so easy after the mm rewrite that I felt it was worth implementing: the
vm86 code is less than 50 lines of C right now.

                Linus

PS.  The bright spot of the week goes to "The Oxford Beer Trolls" - all
UK inhabitants should probably be locked into some (big) mental
institution and TOBT should probably have a wing of their own, but
thanks to them linux can now call itself "beerware" :-)

Make the page allocator use a free page list instead of a silly
linear search.

Add sys_vhangup() and stubs for send/rcv/sendto/recvfrom/shutdown.
We're making ready for real networking..

Remove nonworking extfs bitmap allocators. We'll have them in ext2.

[Original announcement below]

Patch 1 is essentially a performance-release, but it also contains some
other patches: Ross Biro's tcp-ip stubs are there (but not the tcpip
subdirectory: alpha-testers should know where to find that), as are the
ext-fs superblock cleanups. The first header-file patch by hlu is also
in there.

The resulting patch is pretty big - it's also not as cleaned up as I'd
like it to be.  The swapping/buffer-block handling heuristics are
better, but could still do with some tuning.  Also, the idle task in
this version doesn't do very much: it will be expanded to do some more
page-table calculations.

I will be unable to hack on linux for a couple of weeks (I'll still
answer mails, read the newsgroup and fix bugs, but no heavy-duty
hacking) due to some "circumstances beyond my control".  That probably
means that this patch is the last one for a while (three weeks) unless
some bad bugs show up.

                Linus