GitLab

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.

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.

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)

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

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

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 changes are to the
tcp/ip code and the serial driver, while there are various minor fixes
strewn around the system:

 - serial lines/tty changes (tytso & Fred v Kempen)
 - NFS bugfixes (Rick Sladkey)
 - tcp/ip (Ross Biro)
 - coprocessor handling changes (me)
 - harddisk driver error handling (Mika Liljeberg)
 - various minor patches (me and others)

Serial lines now implement non-blocking opens correctly and support
dial-out lines (same minor, major==5).  I changed the default startup
mode to be CLOCAL so that people won't get confused by the modem line
code when not using dial-in.

Another interesting change is the 387 error-coupling tests at bootup:
the code to check if the intel-recommended exception 16 error reporting
is present is "non-obvious".  If you have had problems with coprocessor
error handling, or have a non-intel coprocessor, I'd suggest you test
this out: I'd like to hear about problems/successes.

                Linus

PS.  If you tested out the latest ALPHA-diffs (the ones that already
changed the kernel version to pl5), the changes to the final pl5 were
only cosmetic.

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 the system goes on (it can be
moving the mouse, but it might also be a keyboard event etc).

            Linus

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.  It now handles resend requests
   from the keyboard etc.
 - you can run executables from filesystems without bmap support.  This
   mainly means NFS and msdos.  Note that while it's possible, it's
   slower and less memory-efficient than using a "normal" linux
   filesystem, and should generally be avoided.
 - /proc filesystem changes: /proc/kmsg can be used to log the kernel
   messages under X11 (instead of using the older system call to do the
   same), and there are changes to the statistics routines (WCHAN).

+ various minor fixes (non-existent devices are handled better, some
changes to socket bind behaviour etc).

                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.

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 work correctly now (this may have
   been the reason "mkfs -c" didn't work in all cases).  Thanks for some
   good bug-reports I've gotten: I've tried to correct all the problems
   I got reports on.
 - The kernel configuration has been re-thought: I decided to take
   advantage of the possibilities offered by GNU make etc.  This means
   that you no longer can compile the kernel using any other make, but
   there probably aren't many (if any) people doing that anyway.  This
   way I got rid of the extremely ugly SCSI setup, so it was probably
   worth it.

To configure the kernel for your setup, do a

        make config

and answer the yes/no questions. After that, do a

        make dep

to make the dependencies match your setup.  After that you should still
go edit the top-level Makefile for some of the configuration information
as before, but the remaining config things are pretty simple.  Then you
can make the kernel with a simple "make Image".

The new configuration utility (essentially a stupid shell script coupled
with some smarts in the Makefiles) tries to minimize compilations: if
you disable the SCSI code the scsi drivers won't even be compiled, much
less linked in.  This should be a win on slower machines.

NOTE!!! Use LILO-0.7 to load the 0.98pl5 and newer kernels: any older
version of lilo is liable to result in weird problems.

                Linus

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