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There's a rather huge patch-set out there now, taking the 2.3.x series to
2.3.15.
This has a lot of the merge code I've been sent over the last two weeks,
but I will invariably have missed some, if for no other reason than simply
that I got absolutely _flooded_ by people sending me patches.

One of the more interesting things was the SMP pipe cleanup sent by
Richard, but try as I might it was never really stable under load on x86 -
not with the plain semaphores in 2.3.14, and not with the patches Andrea
had either. I assume Richard tested it on an alpha with the much more
well-thought-out atomic operation that the alpha provides.

I ended up rewriting the x86 semaphore code (and some of Richards pipe
code too, for that matter, to get rid of some races in waking things up),
and it doesn't show the problems I saw before, but hey, maybe I just
exchanged one set of problems for another set that I can't trigger any
more. Give me feedback, please.

Other features that don't impact everybody, but are rather major:
 - ATM support merged in
 - firewalling is gone (again), replaced by an even more generic netfilter
   facility.
 - general networking merges and updates
 - Various driver updates (ISDN, ISA PnP, sound, fbcon, usb, intelliport,
   you name it)
 - make system call return type "long" even if the system call only
   returns valid data in the lower order bits - we use the high bits for
   error handling, and some 64-bit architectures care (read: the Merced
   calling conventions want this because they don't automatically extend
   the return type - I bet it will be a new portability issue for other
   programs than just the kernel)

Have fun,
                Linus

There's a pre-2.3.4-1 out there in "testing" on ftp.kernel.org, which has
the new scalable network code (well, the first cut of it, anyway). It also
updates ISDN and PPC to newer versions. Please test it out and give
feedback..

                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.

Oh, well.. Based on what the arca-[678] patches did, there's now a pre-5
out there. Not very similar, but it should incorporate the basic idea:
namely much more aggressively asynchronous swap-outs from a process
context.
Comment away,
                Linus

Well, some people obviously had problems with the first 2.2.0pre, so
there's a second one there. Most of it is almost purely syntactic sugar:
configuration issues and jiffies wraparound, but there were a few problems
wrt some IDE disk geometry stuff in particular that made 2.2.0pre1 not
boot for some people.

Other real changes:
 - nfsd updated, and we have an official maintainer for knfsd (and I was
   happy by how many people were ready to stand up for it. Good show,
   guys!)
 - network driver updates (tulip/eepro)
 - some TCP fixes for occasional but nasty performance problems.
 - fix for an attack where you could cause a complete and utter lockup of
   the kernel as a normal user. Thanks to Michael Chastain for keeping the
   faith on this one and reminding me to fix it.

If you haven't had problems with pre1, there should be no major cause to
look at pre2. But if you haven't even looked at pre1 yet, please consider
looking at the pre-2.2.0 kernels before it's too late. I'm going to be
extremely rude to people who knew better but didn't test out the pre-
kernels and then send me bug-reports on the released 2.2.0.

		Linus

.. is out there now, and includes:

 - subtle fix for lazy FP save and restore on x86. The bug has been there
   for a long time, but was apparently triggered by the re-write of the
   low-level scheduling function. It could result in corrupted i387 state
   under certain (admittedly fairly unlikely) circumstances.
 - various networking updates. Some of the bugs fixed could result in
   kernel Oopses. None of them were common, though.
 - fixes for both filesystem accounting and quota handling.
 - the much-ado-about-little video driver merge.
 - PPC and Sparc updates
 - i386/SMP interrupt handling falls back on the safe mode.. Please tell
   me whether there are still machines with problems.
 - some new network drivers and updates
 - final (we hope) IP masquerade update

I still have a problem with certain machines that apparently don't want to
boot with the keyboard not plugged in even though they should. Kill me
now. If you have problems with i386/SMP on a machine without a keyboard,
plug one in and send me a report..

seems to have found and fixed the TCP performance problem, which means
that the code-freeze for 2.2 is going to go into effect shortly..

pre-90 does a few other minor things, like for example getting rid of
kerneld because the new kmod thing is a lot simpler in many ways. Let's
see what the reaction to that is, but I'm fairly certain that this was a
major good thing: I've personally never liked kerneld, but kmod seems to
be a much nicer and more controlled way of handling the same issues that
kerneld tried to do. I'd actually almost be willing to use the thing
myself, something that was never true of kerneld.

This also moves the WD7000 SCSI driver to a working status again, thanks
to Miroslav Zagorac.

But the interesting and important part of the patches are the networking
fixes from David and Bill Hawes..

                Linus