There's a Linux-2.3.3 out there on ftp.kernel.org, this one hopefully
fixes pretty much all the waitqueue changes (and I'll disable waitqueue
debugging in 2.3.4 unless something comes up).

And yes, before anybody tells me, I know I forgot to increment the version
number. So "uname" is goign to report 2.3.2 unless you fix that by hand.
I'm also leaving for a very quick trip to Finland in another two hours, so
don't bother emailing me - please discuss isues on the kernel list, and

I'll catch up when I get back on Friday (yes, I'll spen as much time in
airplanes as I do on the ground - fun, fun).
Have fun,

                Linus

As to 2.3.x, we're beginning with a long overdue waitqueue cleanup, which
means that a lot of small details need to get fixed in a variety of files.
A working pre-patch of this is to be found as pre-patch-2.3.1-3, but not
all drivers have been fixed - and help is appreciated (even drivers that
_have_ been fixed have not necessarily actually been tested due to lack of
hardware).

	Linus

(Just change Makefile version)

Most of 2.2.8 by far is just architecture updates: arm, ppc and m68k stand
out as having been pretty much synchronized to their respective devel
trees, but there are some fixes to alpha and x86 too.

The one major fix in 2.2.8 is the SMP fix for disable_irq(), courtesy of
Andrea Arcangeli (I disagreed in details and did it differently in the
end, but all the heavy lifting was done by Andrea). This is the thing that
caused silenth deaths for some people with certain network adapters (3c509
and 8390-based cards in particular: the latter covers ne2000 clones which
are fairly common).

There are lots of smaller things (driver updates, filesystem cleanups and
some networking fixes), but the SMP irq thing is the one to kill for if
you happened to have any of the affected cards.

and I'd really like people to give it a good testing: especially if you've
seen slow network connections to some clients (ie Windows). David worked
in the compatibility patches to work around some of the Windows TCP stack
"features" (and Apple too, for that matter), and we want to get this well
tested. It's all fairly straightforward, but let's be careful out there..

                Linus

I made Linux-2.2.5 yesterday (as some people already have noticed: due to
popular demand I try to delay the announcement for some time in order to
let the thing percolate to mirror sites, in case anybody wondered).
The 2.2.5 release is meant to be a final cleanup release before I leave
for a two-week vacation. So please take these release notes to also mean
that it is probably a good idea to hold off emailing me stuff directly,
unless it is a major bug that you really think I should look at
immediately. I would suggest people discuss problems on the mailing list
and on the newsgroups, where other competent people are, rather than
expecting me to do much about it.

Also, note that there have been various indications that egcs potentially
miscompiles the kernel, or at least makes some problems worse. We don't
know whether that is due to one or more kernel bugs, compiler problems, or
just combinations of "features" in both. I would suggest that if you have
problems you at least verify whether the problems still exist with
gcc-2.7.2.

That said, I bet that both the kernel people and the egcs people would be
really happy the more people look into this - if somebody feels motivated
enough and sees problems with egcs, it would be extremely powerful to try
to pinpoint the particular file that seems to bring on the problems. I'm
afraid it needs a known failure mode and lots of legwork to find out what
triggers it, though.

 - compiles with accounting.
 - add support for Microgate SyncLink and Synchronous HDLC
 - stallion driver update
 - alpha EV6 and SMP fix for bootup with newer compilers
 - ptrace fix for sparc/i386
 - small sparc updates
 - floppy driver could oops at bootup under certain setups
 - random driver updates (bw-qcam, sound driver error codes, etc oneliners)
 - FIOASYNC ioctl fix
 - network locking fixes
 - SMP "struct user" and signal sending fixes

Have fun, because I will,

                        Linus

As of 2.2.4, I should be synchronized with the Sparc[64] and PPC ports,
which is the major reason why the patch is pretty huge. Apart from the
architecture synchronizations, 2.2.4 does:

 - dumping core over NFS could do bad things. Core-dumping cleaned up and
   fixed.

 - various small TCP/IP buglets fixed. Linux got confused by hosts that
   didn't report any mss, and had problems with zero-sized fragments, etc.

 - various small, often silly bugs fixed (PC BIOS PCI buglet, alpha
   semaphores, bottom half interrupts, fork() returns wrong error code).

 - tons of driver updates

 - updated net scheduling code (CONFIG_NET_SCHED)

Most of the fixes aren't all that noticeable, but some of them can be
showstoppers depending on whether you've ever seen them.

There's a new pre-patch for 2.2.3, one that I was already going to make
the final 2.2.3, but I decided that I'm chicken after all, and that I
might as well let some people check that it's sane.
This pre-2.2.3 does:

 - Fix some silly NFS problems. Some of them can be quite bad: lost error
   notification of asynchronous writes, which can result in horrible
   problems (including lost email etc). Most people wouldn't ever notice,
   so don't panic, but forgetting about the error notification certainly
   counts as a brown paper bag.
 - Alpha should compile and work again
 - Various driver updates. This is actually the bulk of the patch, with
   IRDA updates, some scsi, video and sound driver updates etc.
 - The "mmap forgets about the file that was mapped" bug that has been
   discussed here. Only affected certain drivers.
 - shaper atomicity fixes
 - various minor TCP fixes
 - buffer growth fix and recursive IO memory reclaim fix from Andrea
 - network filter compiles ;)
 - unix gc fixes

Tell me if you see problems, because I'm going to release it as 2.2.3
unless people tell me otherwise..

                Linus

In a superhuman effort to not get killed by my wife, I delayed the latest
release for a day. And in fact, it's still just a pre-release, because I
wanted to check with Ingo that I have his latest IO-APIC code with the
proper handling of ExtINT. Ingo?

Anyway, the "not quite valentine days release" (also known as the "horny
greased weasel", aka "presidents day" release ;), is right now a pre-patch
on ftp.kernel.org: /pub/linux/kernel/testing/pre-patch-2.2.2-4.gz.

Happily, I haven't heard of any new real show-stoppers, which is good
(especially considering the fact that I gave it an extra week just to hear
if somebody could come up with some new problems). The things fixed
relative to 2.2.1 are:

 - the inode thing. If you don't know, don't worry.
 - config scripts updated
 - IO-APIC cleanups and fixes, so that people with strange motherboards
   should be able to reboot cleanly and not get unexpected interrupts.
 - 2kB sector media (ie mostly MO) fixes. See all the warnings on the
   lists about fdisk confusion etc if you have one of these things.
 - IDE disk cleanups/fixes (geometry and autodetection)
 - PS/2 mouse hides ACK's again
 - pty crash fix
 - some network driver fixes (out-of-memory and shared interrupts)
 - some sound and video updates.
 - lockd cookie fixes
 - nfsd readdir reply cache fix
 - filesystem/VM deadlock avoidance (new deamon: kpiod)
 - SMP scheduler race condition (which nobody has probably ever seen)
 - TCP socket locking fix

Most of the above are really hard to see in the first place, and not
something most people would ever hit (with the possible exception of the
inode thang).  But it would be good to have a really rock solid 2.2.2, so
if people could just bother to check that it works for them, and I'll make
this official tomorrow.

                Linus

this one contains various small documentation updates and updates to xconfig,
but the important parts (and the smallest part of the actual patch) are:

 - shared file lockup fix by Stephen Tweedie
 - my fix for the TCP bug that Ingo found
 - Ingo's io-apic setup fixes, which should finally get rid of the
   spurious apic interrupts with some motherboards and the ExtINT setup.
 - inode leak thing
 - SMP scheduler potential race condition fix
 - sound driver updates
 - partition and disk fixes (2kB blocksize media and some IDE disk
   geometry and irq detection issues).

None of the fixes are critical to most people, but all of them _can_ be
critical to people who have seen vulnerabilities in the area. As such, if
you're happy with 2.2.1 there is no pressing reason to test this patch
out, but I hope to have the pre-patches so that the final 2.2.2 can be
left around for a while (CD-ROM manufacturers etc would certainly prefer
to not see lots of releases).

                Linus