sbpcd (Sound Blaster Pro CD interface) driver.

Andries Brouwer cleans up and re-does keyboard driver diacritical handling.

Lots of new sound drivers.

Sysvfs added (Xenix, SystemV/386 and Coherent support).  Linux was
starting to have a lot of users move over..

MAP_ANONYMOUS flag added to mmap().

Loadable modules added.

Alan Cox is active in networking.

[original changelog below]

Linux 0.99.15 released: Codefreeze for 1.0

People who look into my directory on ftp.funet.fi will already have
noticed that the latest version of linux (0.99.15) is available, and I
assume it will be available on most other linux sites soon.  As
explained in a previous announcement, 0.99.15 is "it", in that this will
be the base for 1.0 after about a month of testing.  No further patches
are accepted until the 1.0 release, unless they obviously fix a serious
bug.

**** NOTE 1 ****

  For this code-freeze to be effective yet still potential bugs be
  found, testing is needed, along with good reports of errors and
  problems.  Thus, nobody should think "hey, the *real* release will be
  out in a month, let's wait for that", but instead think: "hey, I'd
  better test this one, so that the *real* release won't result in any
  ugly surprises for me".

  In short: test it out, preferably even more than you usually do.  Run
  "crashme" for the whole month if you have the CPU-power to spare,
  and/or just misuse your machine as badly as you can.  And if there are
  problems, report them to me (and the better the report, the more
  likely I am to be able to do something about it).

**** NOTE 2 ****

  Bumping the linux version number to 1.0 doesn't mean anything more
  than that: it's only a version number change.  More explicitly, it
  does *NOT* mean that linux will become commercial (the copyright will
  remain as-is), nor does it mean that development stops here, and that
  1.0 will be anything special in that respect.

  I'm also afraid that just changing the version number will not make
  potential bugs magically disappear: this has been amply proven by
  various software houses over the years.  This code-freeze is there in
  order to avoid most of the problems that people sometimes associate
  with "X.0 releases", and I hope that it will mean that we have a
  reasonably stable release that we can call 1.0 and one that I won't
  have to be ashamed of.

  Ok, enough said, I hope.  The pl15 release is hopefully good, but I'll
  continue to make ALPHA patches against it along the whole month as
  problems crop up.  The networking code has been much maligned, and is
  not perfect by far yet, but it's getting its act together thanks to
  various developers and testers.  And as wiser men than I have said (or
  if they haven't, they should have):

      "There is life after 1.0"

  Any rumors that the world is coming to an end just because I'm about to
  release a 1.0-version are greatly exaggerated.  I think.

                    Linus

----------
Things that remained the same between 0.99.14 and 0.99.15:

- I again forgot to update the README before uploading the release.  In
  pl14, I talked about pl13, while the all new and improved README has
  now caught up with pl14.  Remind me to buy a new brain one of these
  days.

Changes between versions 0.99.14 and 0.99.15:

 - improved Pentium detection.  Some of you may have had linux report
   your 4086DX2 as a pentium machine, but the new kernel will tell you
   the sad truth.  Whee.
 - Network driver updates by Donald Becker.  New drivers added, old ones
   updated.
 - FPU emulation updates by Bill Metzenthen.  Various minor errors and
   misfeatures fixed (mostly error handling).
 - Support for the SoubdBlaster Pro CD-ROM driver added by Eberhard
   Moenkeberg.
 - extended support for keyboard re-definition, along with font
   re-programming (Eugene Crosser, Andries Brouwer et al).
 - tty handling fixes: true canonical mode with most features supported
   by Julian Cowley.  This may make your canonical mode behave funnily
   if you happen to use old and broken programs that happened to work
   with the old and broken behaviour (this includes at least some
   'getty' programs).
 - serial driver changes and tty fixes by Theodore Ts'o.
 - SCSI fixes by Drew Eckhardt, Eric Youngdale, Rik Faith, Kai Mdkisara
   et al.
 - Updated sound card driver to version 2.4 (Hannu Savolainen)
 - COFF binary loading support (but you will still need the experimental
   iBCS2 patches to run non-linux i386 COFF binaries) by Al Longyear.
 - Upgraded ext2fs filesystem routines (0.4a -> 0.4b), with new
   features.  Read the fs/ext2/CHANGES file for details.  Remy Card and
   Stephen Tweedie.  Get a new fsck that knows about the new features.
 - pipe behaviour fixed in the presense of multiple writers (now
   actually conforms to POSIX specs about atomic writes).  Much of the
   code by Florian Coosmann.
 - minix filesystem extended to support the clean flag: get a new fsck
   that knows about it.
 - System V filesystem (support for Xenix, Coherent and SysV
   filesystems) by Doug Evans, Paul Monday, Pascal Haible and Bruno
   Haible.
 - loadable modules (various authors, don't remember original author of
   the "modules" code).
 - Lots of networking fixes by various people: Alan Cox, Charles
   Hedrick, me and various other people.  Non-byte-aligned networks
   work, and the networking code should be much stabler in general.

 + various bugfixes and enhacements here and there (mcd driver update by
   Jon Tombs, atixlmouse fix by Chris Colohan, /dev/full by XXX etc etc)

All in all, the patches come out to 1.5MB uncompressed (about 400kB
gzip-9'd), so there is little or no idea to make patches to plain pl14
available.  Incremental patches and ALPHA-releases can be found on
ftp.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus/ALPHA-pl14.

hopefully make linux 1.0 a reality.  The plan has been discussed a bit
with various developers already, and is already late, but is still in
effect otherwise.

In short, the next version of linux (0.99.15) will be a "full-featured"
release, and only obvious bug-fixes to existing features will be applied
before calling it 1.0.  If this means that your favourite feature or
networking version won't make it, don't despair: there is life even
after beta (and it's probably not worth mailing me about it any more:
I've seen quite a few favourite features already ;-).

In fact, 1.0 has little "real meaning", as far as development goes, but
should be taken as an indication that it can be used for real work
(which has been true for some time, depending on your definition of
"real work").  Development won't stop or even slow down: some of it has
even been shelved pending a 1.0 already.

Calling it 1.0 will not necessarily make all bugs go away (quite the
opposite, judging by some other programs), but I hope it will be a
reasonably stable release.  In order to accomplish this, the code-freeze
after 0.99.15 will be about a month, and I hope people will test out
that kernel heavily, instead of waiting for "the real release" so that
any potential bugs can be found and fixed.

As to where we are now: as of this moment, the latest release is the 'r'
version of pl14 (aka "ALPHA-pl14r").  I've made ALPHA releases available
on ftp.funet.fi almost daily, and expect a final pl15 within a few more
days.  Testing out the ALPHA releases is not discouraged either if you
like recompiling kernels every day or two..

And finally: we also try to create a "credits" file that mentions the
developers of the kernel and essential linux utilities.  The credit file
compilator is jmartin@opus.starlab.csc.com (John A. Martin), and if you
feel you have cause to be mentioned in it, please contact him.

            Linus

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 maps should be obvious after looking at
   the examples.

 - The memory manager has been cleaned up substantially, and mmap()
   works for MAP_PRIVATE.  MAP_SHARED is still not supported for
   anything else than /dev/mem, but even so it actually is usable for a
   lot of applications.  The shared library routines have been rewritten
   to use mmap() instead of the old hardcoded behaviour.

 - The kernel is now compiled with C++ instead of plain C.  Very few
   actual C++ features are used, but even so C++ allows for more
   type-checking and type-safe linkage.

 - The filesystem routines have been cleaned up for multiple block
   sizes.  None of the filesystems use it yet, but people are working on
   it.

 - named pipes and normal pipes should hopefully have the right select()
   semantics in the presense/absense of writers.

 - QIC-02 tape driver by Hennus Bergman

 - selection patches in the default kernel

 - fixed a bug in the pty code which led to busy waiting in some
   circumstances instead of sleeping.

 - Compressed SLIP support (Charles Hedrick). See net/inet/CONFIG

 - the 'clear_bit()' function was changed to return the previous setting
   of the bit instead of the old "error-code".  This makes use of the
   bit operations more logical.

 - udelay() function for short delays (busy-waiting) added.  Used
   currently only by the QIC driver.

 - fork() and sheduler changes to make task switches happen only from
   kernel mode to kernel mode.  Cleaner and more portable than the old
   code which counted on being able to task-switch directly into user
   mode.

 - debugging malloc code.

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, some of them cosmetic, some of them fixes to
  smaller bugs..  Thanks to everybody who sent them in (even though not
  all made it)

It might be a good idea to test it all out,

            Linus

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):

- the signal handling code has been extensively reworked, and should be
  POSIX as well as clean.
- dosfs is upgraded to version 12 (Werner Almesberger)
- xiafs is upgraded to the latest version (Qi Xia)
- ext2fs is upgraded to the latest version (Remy Card/Stephen Tweedie)
- FPU-emulation patches for v86 mode and precision rounding (Bill
  Metzenthen)
- SCSI patches by various people (Eric Youngdale & co)
- XT harddisk support (Pat Mackinlay)
- new trial code to try to handle 387 lockups on some systems more
  gracefully.
- keyboard, lp and serial driver fixes
- various minor changes (mounting root read-only, bootup messages
  cleaned up etc)

As always, comments/bugs etc are encouraged,

            Linus

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 the latest version
- the XT disk driver is included: I haven't been able to test it, but
  at least it won't bother anybody if you don't configure it in..
- the latest serial diffs are in
- minor ultrastor fixes
- some changes to the keyboard and line printer drivers: I hope the
  keyboard lockups that some people have reported would be gone with
  this release.
- some fixes to arp.c

I'll be interested in success/failure reports, although I won't be able
to answer them for some time (and I might miss some of the posts on
c.o.l).

            Linus

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 weeks since the last release, so it's high time you
should once more enjoy the pleasures of patching up your kernel to a
higher version number if you are into those kinds of perversions.  Linux
0.99pl7 is available as both full source and diffs against pl6 on
nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus, and it will probably show up on
the other major sites within days.

As of pl7, I'm trying out a new format: both the full distribution and
the diffs are now compressed with gzip as it is now available at most
machines.  Also, the diffs are no longer context diffs: they use the
smaller unified diff format.  At least the stock SunOS 'patch' binary
seems not to understand them at all, but GNU patch has no problems, and
unified diffs are a bit smaller (not that it matters much after gzip has
done its deed on them).

As to the changes in pl7: they are many and varied, and hopefully all to
the better (-"Dream on Linus" -"Shut up").  Short list follows, hope I
haven't forgotten anything major.

 - ext2fs is in: note that this is version 0.2c and that if you are
   currently using an older version there are some changes.  Small
   filesystems (< 256MB) should reportedly be automatically converted,
   bigger filesystems need some assistance. Ext2fs written by Remy Card.
 - xiafs is also in: again, the final version uses a slightly different
   layout to support exact file block counts, so if you use the xiafs,
   you should make sure you have the latest fs-tools.  Xiafs written by
   Frank Xia.
 - updated Ultrastor SCSI driver with scatter/gather by Scott Taylor.
   It should be much faster, as well as support the Ultrastor-34F.
 - major changes in the memory manager.  Yours truly got carried away,
   and finally cleaned up the mm layer due to pmacdona wanting mmap() on
   /dev/zero.  This means that the IPC patches won't go in, and need
   updating.  Krishna?
 - more big changes: I rewrote most of the VFS filename-handling.
   Filenames are copied into kernel space before being used, which
   cleaned things up somewhat, as well as simplifying some race-
   condition handling.  As a result, I was also able to easily expand
   the minix fs to cover the "linux" fs that some people have been using
   (same layout, but with 30-character names).
 - updated the printer driver: Nigel Gamble.  It is now able to use
   interrupts, although the default behaviour is still to poll.
 - serial driver updates by tytso (but no SLIP yet)
 - various minor patches for POSIX compliace: Bruce Evans, Rick Sladkey
   and me.
 - other minor patches all over the place: scsi, tcpip etc.

All in all, the patches are almost half a megabyte even as unified
diffs: getting the full sources might be easier than patching it all up.

As always, some of the patches are actually tested by me, some aren't
(and just because I wrote some of them doesn't mean I actually *tested*
them: I have no idea if mmap() works on /dev/zero, although it should).
I have neither a printer nor an Ultrastor controller, and I haven't got
the diskspace to test out the new filesystems, so I can only hope they
work "as advertized".  If you have problems, I want to hear about them,
so keep the reports coming, and try to pinpoint the problem as well as
you can ("when I do *this* it happens every time..").

                Linus

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 functions for special devices as well
as adding a 'fsync' field to the inode-operations structure.  Thus
ext2fs and xfs need updating.  Remy and Xia? The special file and fifo
handling code is no longer supposed to be in the fs-dependent layer, but
is handled by the vfs routines, as it's the same for all "normal"
filesystems.

Ok, here are the actual changes/features of pl6:
- the kernel can be loaded in gzipped format and de-compressed at
  startup beyond the 1MB mark.  Good for bootable rootdisks.  Patches
  mainly by Hannu Savolainen.
- I finally enabled NMI's everywhere (except at the bootup sequence),
  so if you have memory errors, they will hopefully now result in
  kernel messages ("NMI received..")
- the device registration code for special devices.  Special files are
  now registered with a special "register_[chr|blk]dev()" function.
- consolidated fifo/special dev handling
- vhangup patches.  Note that these may break init/login badly, at
  least if you are using poeigl-1.7.  Be careful that you don't get
  totally locked out of your machine.
- the procfs NULL-dereferencing bugfix (michaelkjohnson)
- literal next character handling (very losely based on a patch I
  received: I essentially rewrote it with final fixes by jrs).
- fpu-emu bugfixes by Bill Metzenthen - fixes the "internal error 112"
  bug as well as a sign bug with zero.
- fdomain driver fixes
- various other minor fixes (wrongly replying to bad ip messages etc)

I'm still not sure about the 387 error detection code: I have had a
couple of messages that would suggest that some early clone 387's have
problems with math exceptions in protected mode.  With the new (as of
99pl5) test at startup this can lead to problems at boot-time.  Please
mail me directly if you seem to have problems with this (it should be
obvious in pl6 due to debugging messages at startup).

            Linus