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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.

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

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

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 busy stuffing
themself with turkey to try out a new kernel release.  There is just
over a week left of this year, and I need feedback in order to be able
to release 1.0.

                Linus

PS.  Thanks to everybody who has sent me Christmas/New Year/Birthday
cards.  Some contained money, some didn't, and I enjoyed them all.
Thanks.

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

Move <xxx.h> to <linux/xxxx.h>

Variable-sized buffer blocks and dynamic buffer cache allocation. The VM
knows how to shrink it automatically!

Add support for "fast" interrupt handlers for serial lines.

Update copyrights to say 1992 too.

Remove broken VESA video card handling.

Separate out partition handling code ("genhd").

Make init unkillable.

Norwegian keyboard map.

Future Domain SCSI controller driver by Rik Faith.

Changes in 0.97:

 - The VESA-support was removed.  I'd be happy to put it back once it
   works on all hardware.  Instead of the VESA-code, I finally put in
   the automatic SVGA setup patches.  See the top-level Makefile.

 - The IRQ code has solidified, and should work on all machines.  Not
   all of the SCSI drivers use it yet, so I expect patches for that..

 - Serial interrupts are handled slightly differently, and performance
   should be up.  I've sent out a few alpha-releases, and testing seems
   to indicate that's actually true this time.  Reactions have ranged
   from "nice" to "wonderful" :-)

 - The buffer-cache and memory management code has been edited quite a
   bit.  ps/free etc programs that reads kernel memory directly no
   longer work, and even a recompilation won't be enough.  They actually
   need editing before they work.

   The buffer-cache now grows and shrinks dynamically depending on how
   much free memory there is.  Shift+PrintScreen will give some memory
   statistics.  (Ctrl+PrSc gives task-info, ALT+PrSc gives current
   register values).

   The mm code changes removed some race-conditions in the VM code, and
   I also tried to make the Out-of-swapspace error less severe (better
   thrashing-detection etc).

 - The super-block code has been cleaned up.  Especially the extended fs
   needs to be edited a bit to take advantage of the new setup, and I
   expect Remy Card will have a patch out eventually.

 - include-files have been moved around some more: there are still some
   names that clash with the standard headers, but not many.

 - Unswappable processes implemented: by default only 'init' is
   unswappable.  This is a bit safer in low-memory conditions, as at
   least init won't die due to low memory.  I also made killing init
   impossible: if init doesn't recognize a signal, it simply won't get
   it.  Some other changes ("while (1) fork();" won't kill the machine
   for non-root users etc)

 - The new SCSI drivers are in.  These make the kernel noticeably
   bigger, but you can leave them out if you don't want them.

 - The floppy- and hd-drivers print out more debugging-info in case of
   errors: this might be irritating if you have hardware that works, but
   often gives soft-errors.  On the other hand, some old debugging-info
   was removed - notably for user-level protection errors etc.

 - Various minor fixes.  I haven't made cdiffs (and I haven't gotten any
   requests for them, so I probably never will), but they would be
   pretty big.

Things that I didn't have time for:

 - I wanted to rewrite the tty drivers to be more "streams-like" (ie not
   an actual streams-implementation, but some of the ideas from
   streams).  I never got around to it: there was simply too much else
   to do.

 - I got a lot of patches, and some went in, others didn't.  If you
   think your patch was important, please re-send it relative to the new
   version.

I'd like comments on the new system: performance / clarity of code etc.
0.97 should correct all known bugs (at least the ones I know about), but
I guess that's just wishful thinking.

Note that the dynamic buffer-code also handles differently-sized
buffers, but that the rest of the system (block device drivers,
filesystem code etc) cannot yet take advantage of this - there is still
some coding needed.

		Linus

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

I have just sent off the second patch to 0.96a: it should be on the
normal ftp-sites (nic, tsx-11 and banjo), although the only site which I
can make it directly readable on is banjo, so on the other sites it will
take the site-managers to make the patch available.

Patch 2 implements:

- itimers (by Darren Senn), which are now also used to implement the
  alarm() system call.

- ultrastor scsi driver patches (by gentzel)

- [f]statfs() system call is implemented (so df can be made fs-
  independent). Also some other minor fs-changes for the upcoming new
  filesystem. Patches by Remy Card.

- preliminary core-file dumping code (linux creates a core-file, but
  it's not in the correct format yet [*]).

- minor changes/bugfixes.

While patching in patch1 is a good idea for anybody, patch 2 isn't
really vital. I've made it available just so kernel hackers can keep up
with the kernel I have right now if they wish. Patch 2 is relative to
patch 1: you have to patch that in first.

[*] The current core-file is very simple, and the kernel code is there
just so that some enterprising character can expand it. A core-file
looks like this right now:

offset data
0x0000 "core-dump: regs=\n"
0x0040 struct pt_regs (see <sys/ptrace.c>)
0x0400 "floating-point regs:\n"
0x0440 struct i387 (see <linux/sched.h>)
0x0800 the first 1kB of user-space

Not very practical, but it /might/ help if the X-server dies of a
segmentation fault or similar (you can use pt_regs.eip to see where it
happened). The kernel code is very easy to change to accomodate for the
real core-file format, I just didn't know what it should be.

                Linus

Bruce Evans shows up here quickly.

Bruce was the author of the Minix/386 patches, and had been one of my
sounding boards for my early development, so it was very gratifying to
see him get interested in Linux.  As it turned out, what he was _really_
interested in was the serial driver, and the Linux serial driver was
already in reasonably good shape.

As a result, Bruce went off to work on 386BSD instead (where the serial
driver was truly crappy), but here he worked on some boot loader cleanups.

Bruce was my hero.

Anyway...  More VFS work here: readdir, bmap and ioctl's are now virtual
operations, and the superblock code is properly virtualized.

Other changes:

 - James Wiegand writes initial parallell port printer driver

 - major/minor fault tracking

 - I rewrote big chunks of ptrace.c

This was the first kernel that got released under the GPL (0.12 had a
time-lapse to make sure the people involved accepted the license change:
nobody ever complained).

Because 0.12 had been so successful, this was supposed to be closer to
1.0.  Yeah, right.  1.0 was eventually released almost exactly two years
later..

The big change here is the first signs of a real VFS layer: while the
only available filesystem is still the Minix-compatible one, the code is
factored out, and the Minix-specific stuff is put in its own directory.
You can clearly see how the thing is moving towards having multiple
different filesystems.

The VFS changes also cause cleanups in various drivers, since we end
up having more clear inode operation structure pointer handling.

Superblock handling is still minix-specific..

NOTE! We also have /bin/init finally.  It still falls through to the old
"run shells forever" case if no init can be found, but it's starting to
look a whole more like real UNIX user-land now..

New developers: Ross Biro shows up, and does ptrace.  He will later end
up doing the first-generation networking code.

Other changes:

 - UK and Danish keyboard maps (and the keyboard driver supported
   "Application mode" keys from vt100+)
 - Make sure interrupts clear the 'D'irection flag
 - Floppy driver gets track buffer, which speeds it up immensely.  This
   was done based on patches by Lawrence Foard (entropy@wintermute.wpi.edu)
 - Lots of buffer cache cleanups.
 - support nonblocking pipe file descriptors
 - recursive symlink support
 - sys_swapon() means that we don't have to select the swap device
   at build (or boot) time ("Written 01/25/92 by Simmule Turner, heavily
   changed by Linus")
 - start some generic timer work (ugh, but these first timers were
   _horrible_ hardcoded things)
 - ptrace for debugging
 - console size query support with TIOC[G|S]WINSZ
 - /dev/kmem ("by Damiano")
 - rebooting (with ctrl-alt-del or sys_reboot()).

From the release notes:

              New features of 0.95, in order of appearance
                      (ie in the order you see them)

      Init/login

Yeah, thanks to poe (Peter Orbaeck (sp?)), linux now boots up like a
real unix with a login-prompt.  Login as root (no passwd), and change
your /etc/passwd to your hearts delight (and add other logins in
/etc/inittab etc).

      Bash is even bigger

It's really a bummer to boot up from floppies: bash takes a long time to
load.  Bash is also now so big that I couldn't fit compress and tar onto
the root-floppy: You'll probably want the old rootimage-0.12 just in
order to get tar+compress onto your harddisk.  If anybody has pointers
to a simple shell that is freely distributable, it might be a good idea
to use that for the root-diskette.

Especially with a small buffer-cache, things aren't fun. Don't worry:
linux runs much better on a harddisk.

      Virtual consoles on any (?) hardware.

You can select one of several consoles by pressing the left alt-key and
a function key at the same time. Linux should report the number of
virtual consoles available upon bootup. /dev/tty0 is now "the current"
screen, /dev/tty1 is the main console, and /dev/tty2-8 can exist
depending on your text-mode or card.

The virtual consoles also have some new screen-handling commands: they
confirm even better to vt200 control codes than 0.11. Special graphic
characters etc: you can well use them as terminals to VMS (although
that's a shameful waste of resources), and the PF1-4 keys work somewhat
in the application-key mode.

      Symbolic links.

0.95 now allows symlinks to point to other symlinks etc (the maximum
depth is a rather arbitrary 5 links). 0.12 didn't like more than one
level of indirection.

      Virtual memory.

VM under 0.95 should be better than under 0.12: no more lockups (as far
as I have seen), and you can now swap to the filesystem as well as to a
special partition. There are two programs to handle this: mkswap to set
up a swap-file/partition and swapon to start up swapping.

mkswap needs either a partition or a file that already exists to make a
swap-area. To make a swap-file, do this:

      # dd bs=1024 count=NN if=/dev/hda of=swapfile
      # mkswap swapfile NN

The first command just makes a file that is NN blocks long (initializing
it from /dev/hda, but that could be anything). The second command then
writes the necessary setup-info into the file. To start swapping, write

      # swapon swapfile

NOTE! 'dd' isn't on the rootdisk: you have to install some things onto
the harddisk before you can get up and running.

NOTE2! When linux runs totally out of virtual memory, things slow down
dramatically. It tries to keep on running as long as it can, but at
least it shouldn't lock up any more. ^C should work, although you might
have to wait a while for it..

      Faster floppies

Ok, you don't notice this much when booting up from a floppy: bash has
grown, so it takes longer to load, and the optimizations work mostly
with sequential accesses.  When you start un-taring floppies to get the
programs onto your harddisk, you'll notice that it's much faster now.
That should be about the only use for floppies under a unix: nobody in
their right mind uses floppies as filesystems.

      Better FS-independence

Hopefully you'll never even notice this, but the filesystem has been
partly rewritten to make it less minix-fs-specific. I haven't
implemented all the VFS-patches I got, so it's still not ready, but it's
getting there, slowly.

      And that's it, I think.

Happy hacking.

                      Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

This was created from a re-packaged 0.12 tree

Major milestone! Over the christmas break, I implemented paging to disk,
meaning that you could actually use gcc on a 2MB system.  Some poor sod
(Robert Blum) wanted to use Linux on such a system, and couldn't get the
kernel to compile with anything less "bloated" than gcc.

[ Irony alert: this was back when gcc worked fine on a system with just
  4MB.  Gone are those days. _Loong_ gone. ]

The task size was still limited to 63 tasks of at most 64MB each, but
other than that we were actually getting usable.

Together with other improvements and fixes, 0.12 was actually a very
nice kernel.  It was by now clearly more usable than Minix, which caused
us to think that a 1.0 release was imminent.  The next kernel version
was to be named 0.95, which turned out to be less than a stellar idea.

This was also the point where we changed the copyright license.  See the
attached original release notes.

Other changes:

 - Ted Ts'o continued on his rampage, and implemented BSD process
   control (ie ^Z) etc.  This also introduced the process tree code,
   with pointers between parents and children, rather than iterating
   over the whole list of processes.

 - Ted also did SVR4-style "saved uid/gid" handling.

 - use the C preprocessor for assembly files, cleaning up a lot of
   duplicate definitions etc.

 - better boot loader diagnostics

 - boot sequence now can change the size of the text display.  Who the
   hell is d88-man?

 - fix nasty race condition between "truncate" and file IO.

 - add support for shared libraries with the "uselib()" system call.
   This (together with the fact that we could share clean executable
   pages) cut down on memory usage a lot.

 - supplemental group support.  Hey, what can I say? Unix users expected
   them.

 - symbolic link handling.  This was the first real extension to the
   standard Minix disk layout, and was made possible by the fact that I
   had written my own "mkfs" and "fsck".  Before that, we were still on
   crutches, in that a Linux system depended on a Minix installation for
   these fundamental system tools.

 - mkdir()/rmdir() isn't just for root, you know..  (Yes, seriously.
   Old-style UNIX used to limit them to root-only, since they were just
   special sequences of mknod's)

 - Virtual terminals by Peter MacDonald (who was to do the SLS
   distribution).

   Before having X, this was a _big_ deal.  The fact that Linux had
   virtual terminals with a good vt100 emulation actually made Linux
   stand out even among some of the big commercial unixes.  The Linux
   console was just _so_ much more pleasant to use that it isn't even
   funny.

 - first implementation of "select()", virtual terminals, and pty's.

   These too were originally done by Peter MacDonald, based on some
   patches that had been floating around for Minix for a long time (but
   were never accepted into Minix).

   They didn't get accepted into Linux either, but the patches _did_ end
   up inspiring me to re-do the select/pty parts in a way that was more
   palatable to me.

 - restartable system calls

   This was needed for Ted's code to do ^Z

 - Math emulation! The code was a total crock, and didn't bother with
   such unnecessary niceties as getting rounding right (or, to be
   honest, even getting more than about 60 bits right), but let's face
   it: it was enough to get work done.

   My math emulation was eventually to be entirely replaced by a much
   more complete, and much more precise implementation by Bill
   Metzenthen.  But my original stupid implementation actually ended
   living on at least for a while in BSD - I ended up making it
   available to the BSD people who couldn't use Bill's much better
   implementation due to licensing reasons.  I don't know whatever
   eventually happened to it.

 - support alignment check on i486+. Nobody seems to have ever used it,
   though.

Original release notes:

         RELEASE NOTES FOR LINUX v0.12

This is file mostly contains info on changed features of Linux, and
using old versions as a help-reference might be a good idea.

         COPYRIGHT

The Linux copyright will change: I've had a couple of requests to make
it compatible with the GNU copyleft, removing the "you may not
distribute it for money" condition.  I agree.  I propose that the
copyright be changed so that it confirms to GNU - pending approval of
the persons who have helped write code.  I assume this is going to be no
problem for anybody: If you have grievances ("I wrote that code assuming
the copyright would stay the same") mail me.  Otherwise The GNU copyleft
takes effect as of the first of February.  If you do not know the gist
of the GNU copyright - read it.

         INSTALLATION

This is a SHORT install-note. The installation is very similar to 0.11,
so read that (INSTALL-0.11) too. There are a couple of programs you will
need to install linux: something that writes disk images (rawrite.exe or
NU or...) and something that can create harddisk partitions (fdisk under
xenix or older versions of dos, edpart.exe or something like that).

NOTE! Repartitioning your harddisk will destroy all data on it (well,
not exactly, but if you know enough to get back the data you probably
didn't need this warning).  So be careful.

READ THIS THROUGH, THEN READ INSTALL-0.11, AND IF YOU ARE SURE YOU KNOW
WHAT YOU ARE DOING, CONTINUE.  OTHERWISE, PANIC.  OR WRITE ME FOR
EXPLANATIONS.  OR DO ANYTHING BUT INSTALL LINUX - IT'S VERY SIMPLE, BUT
IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING YOU'LL PROBABLY BE SORRY.  I'D
RATHER ANSWER A FEW UNNECESSARY MAILS THAN GET MAIL SAYING "YOU KILLED
MY HARDDISK, BASTARD.  I'M GOING TO FIND YOU, AND YOU'LL BE SORRY WHEN I
DO".

1) back up everything you have on your harddisk - linux-0.12 is still in
   beta and might do weird things.  The only thing I guarantee is that
   it has worked fine on /my/ machine - for all I know it might eat your
   harddisk and spit it out in small pieces on any other hardware.

2) Test out the linux boot-disk with the root file system.  If it
   doesn't work, check the hardware requirements, and mail me if you
   still think it should work.  I might not be able to help you, but
   your bug-report would still be appreciated.

   Test that linux can read your harddisk at least partly: run the fdisk
   program on the root-disk, and see if it barfs.  If it tells you about
   any partitions at all, linux can successfully read at least part of
   your harddisk.

3) Make sure that you have a free /primary/ partition.  There can be 4
   primary partitions per drive: newer DOS fdisks seem to be able to
   create only 2 (one primary and one extended).  In that case use some
   other partitioning software: edpart.exe etc.  Linux fdisk currently
   only tells you the partition info - it doesn't write to the disk.

   Remember to check how big your partition was, as that can be used to
   tell which device Linux thinks it is.

4) Boot up linux again, fdisk to make sure you now have the new
   partition, and use mkfs to make a filesystem on one of the partitions
   fdisk reports.  Write "mkfs -c /dev/hdX nnn" where X is the device
   number reported by linux fdisk, and nnn is the size - also reported
   by fdisk.  nnn is the size in /blocks/, ie kilobytes.  You should be
   able to use the size info to determine which partition is represented
   by which device name.

5) Mount the new disk partition: "mount /dev/hdX /user".  Copy over the
   root filesystem to the harddisk, eg like this:

        # for i in bin dev etc usr tmp
        # do
        # cp +recursive /$i /user
        # done

   You caanot use just "cp +recursive / /user", as that will result in a
   loop.

6) Sync the filesystem after you have played around enough, and reboot.

        # sync
        <wait for it to sync>
        ctrl-alt-del

   The folklore says you should do this three times before rebooting:
   once should be enough, but I admit I do it three times anyway :) THIS
   IS IMPORTANT! NEVER EVER FORGET TO SYNC BEFORE KILLING THE MACHINE.

7) Change the bootdisk to understand which partition it should use as a
   root filesystem.  See INSTALL-0.11: it's still the word at offset
   508 into the image. You should be up and running.

That's it. Go back and read the INSTALL-0.11

         New features of 0.12, in order of appearance
         (ie in the order you see them)

        Linux now prints cute dots when loading

WoW. Run, don't walk, to see this :). Seriously, it should hopefully now
load even on machines that never got off the ground before, but
otherwise the loading hasn't changed. Implemented by drew.

        Super-VGA detection for extended alphamun modes

I cannot guarantee it, I didn't write it, but it works great on a ET400
SVGA card.  I'm addicted to the new look with 100x40 character editing,
instead of a cramped 80x25.  This only works on VGA-cards that support
higher text-resolutions, and which are correctly identified. Implemented
by d88-man.

        Job Control.

Ok, everybody used to typing ^Z after they started a long command, and
forgot to put it in the background - now it works on linux too.  Bash
knows the usualy job-control commands: bg, fg, jobs & kill.  I hope
there will be no nasty surprises.  Job control was implemented by
tytso@athena.mit.edu.

        Virtual consoles on EGA/VGA screens.

You can select one of several consoles by pressing the left alt-key and
a function key at the same time. Linux should report the number of
virtual consoles available upon bootup. /dev/tty0 is now "the current"
screen, /dev/tty1 is the main console, and /dev/tty2-8 can exist
depending on your text-mode or card.

NOTE! Scrolling is noticeably much slower with virtual consoles on a
EGA/VGA. The reason is that no longer does linux use all the screen
memory as a long buffer, but crams in several consoles in it. I think
it's worth it.

The virtual consoles also have some new screen-handling commands: they
confirm even better to vt200 control codes than 0.11. Special graphic
characters etc: you can well use them as terminals to VMS (although
that's a shameful waste of resources).

        pty's

Ok. I have to admit that I didn't get the hangup-code working correctly,
but that should be easy to add. The general things are there.

        select

I've never used it, so I cannot say how well it works. My minor testing
seems to indicate that it works ok. vc's, pty's and select were
implemented by pmacdona, although I hacked it heavily.

        387-emulation.

It's not complete, but it works well enough to run those gcc2.0 compiled
programs I tested (few).  None of the "heavy" math-functions are
implemented yet.

        Symbolic links.

Try out a few "ln -s xx yy", and ls -l. Note that I think tar should be
recompiled to know anout them, and probably some other programs too. The
0.12 rootimage-disk has most of the recompiled fileutilities.

        Virtual memory.

In addition to the "mkfs" program, there is now a "mkswap" program on
the root disk.  The syntax is identical: "mkswap -c /dev/hdX nnn", and
again: this writes over the partition, so be careful.  Swapping can then
be enabled by changing the word at offset 506 in the bootimage to the
desired device.  Use the same program as for setting the root file
system (but change the 508 offset to 506 of course).

NOTE! This has been tested by Robert Blum, who has a 2M machine, and it
allows you to run gcc without much memory.  HOWEVER, I had to stop using
it, as my diskspace was eaten up by the beta-gcc-2.0, so I'd like to
hear that it still works: I've been totally unable to make a
swap-partition for even rudimentary testing since about christmastime.
Thus the new changes could possibly just have backfired on the VM, but I
doubt it.

        And that's it, I think.

Happy hacking.

         Linus

This was created from a re-packaged 0.11 tree.

Linux-0.11 has a few rather major improvements, but perhaps most
notably, is the first kernel where some other people start making
real contributions.

 - I fixed the buffer cache code, making it a lot more stable

 - demand-loading from disk. My comment proudly states:

        Once more I can proudly say that linux stood up to being changed: it
        was less than 2 hours work to get demand-loading completely implemented.

   This is a major milestone, since it makes the kernel much more
   powerful than Minix was at the time.  I also share clean pages.

 - we still don't have an /sbin/init, but we now load /etc/rc at bootup,
   and the kernel will loop, spawning shells forever. That makes it easier
   to test things.

 - scaffolding for math emulation introduced.

 - Ted Ts'o shows up as a coder. Ted implements:
        o "#!" escape handling for executables
        o fixes for some file permission handling
        o "sticky" directory bit
        o first "malloc()/free()" implementation.
          (this one is horrible: the free needs the size for good
           performance, which will result in years of "free_s()" pains)
        o adds BSD-style setreuid/gid() handling
        o allows us to specify root device at image build time
        o cleanups of some of the uglier direct %fs-register accesses

 - Galen Hunt shows up as a coder: he's added code to handle different
   video card detection (whereas my original one just handled VGA, we
   now handle CGA, MGA, EGA and VGA)

 - The console can beep now: John T Kohl (who also does the tty KILL
   char handling)

 - we also now have German (Wolfgang Thiel) and French (Marc Corsini)
   keyboard maps.  World Domination!

Btw, if you wonder what the "Urgel" comments are - I was still fairly
Swedish-speaking, and "Urgel" is what I would these days write as "Ugh".

It's a sign of trouble or ugly code.  The floppy driver in particular is
clearly not something I'm very proud of ;).

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