GitLab

More networking updates.. Ross Biro is still struggling with net-1.

Michael Johnson (now RH kernel release manager) works on line printer
driver.

Locking function cleanups (for inodes, superblocks, buffer heads).  We
also now pass in the superblock pointer instead of the device number to
the filesystem routines.  That cleans up use and locking of
"get_super()" a lot.

[Original announcement below]

Ok, I already sent out an announcement last night, but due to the time
(6AM over here) I wasn't really in a mood to write a real annoucement.
Here it is.

linux-0.98.3 is available by anonymous ftp at least on nic.funet.fi:
pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus, both as context diffs against 0.98.2 and the
pre-version of 0.98.3 and as complete source. The complete source
package was done by directly applying the diffs - this means that the
Makefile dependancies are probably not 100% up-to-date as I remove those
from the diffs. It shouldn't be any problem, and you can always do a
"make dep ; make clean" before actually compiling the kernel.

0.98 pl3 fixes several bugs, and should remove all known NULL-pointer
problems that made 0.98.2 unusable for most people. In addition to the
NULL pointer fixes, the following things have changed:

- removed most of the cli-sti pairs in the filesystem code by rewriting
  the locking routines to use a different algorithm, possible due to
  the rewritten wait-queue code that I did back in 0.96c or so.
  Interrupt latency should be better on slow machines, but I don't know
  if it's noticeable.
- Minor 387-emulation fixes by Bill Metzenthen - only noticeable under
  special conditions.
- Corrected various error-returns in the fs (thanks to Bruce Evans for
  running some error diagnostics). Error messages when opening (and
  renaming etc) files that had a non-directory in the path were wrong,
  and should be ok now (ie giving ENOTDIR instead of EACCESS or ENOENT).
  Some other problems reported by Bruce fixed.
- Changed the interface for some fs-related functions due to cleaning
  up super-block handling. Most noticeably, iget() and related
  functions no longer specify the inode with a device and inode number,
  but instead with a super-block pointer and inode number. This is
  more logical, and should make unnamed devices (ie internal
  filesystems like nfs and /proc) cleaner. Also note that the calling
  sequence for sb->s_op->put_inode() also has changed since 0.98. This
  is of interest only if you are writing filesystem drivers..
- ASK_SVGA was broken in 0.98.2 - it should be ok now.

Also, various minor fixes as usual. No new features, but I hope 0.98.3
will be a lot less bug-prone due to the changes since 0.98.1. Some
minor tcp/ip corrections (but most of them were in the pre-release), and
I removed a race-condition in the tty-handling code.

Note that people who use math without a co-processor should certainly
upgrade to 0.98.3: the new emulator is much better than my original one
both in speed and accuracy/exception handling. x11perf is very much
bearable now even without a 387, and things like ray-tracing etc
shouldn't be a problem any more. It's slower than hardware fp, of
course, but at least it works.

The new emulator also means there is no reason for a separate soft-float
library, so I'd assume that will be gone in the next gcc release for
linux.

As usual, a new kernel version probably means you'll have to recompile
'ps' and friends. But at least the same 'ps' sources that worked for
0.97.6 should still work.

                Linus

Start virtualizing real mmap() functionlity in the kernel.  The first
signs of me thinking about this already showed up as some unused header
files earlier, this fleshes things out some more.  No actual filesystem
code yet..

This also removes my old simple math emulator, and introduces the new
and much improved one from Bill Metzenthen.

Bill originally wrote it for the djgpp suite (DJ Delories gcc port to
DOS extenders).  It was much more accurate and well designed than my
hackish one, and I was happy to throw my old code away.  The new math
emulator also did things that I had never bothered with, notably the
more complex i387 functions (exponentials and trig).

I also fixed the static maximum memory limit: we now generate the kernel
page tables dynamically rather than having a 16M or 32M static limit.

SCSI updates: removable media support (which also implies re-reading the
partition table etc)

[Original announcement below]

patch-2 is >150kB compressed, as it c...

Hey, we switched to the GPL several months ago, but only now do we
include the license text itself.  Apparently everybody expected
everybody else to just know what the GPL was..

Add a README on compiling the kernel (by Lasu)

Add PS/2 mouse driver, make generic "mouse" infrastructure.

Add /proc filesystem, clean up minixfs block mapping.

sys_wait4() and swapoff().

VM gets a "secondary page free" list for things like interrupts
that want a page _now_ and can't wait for the regular free list
to fill up.

[Original announcement below]

Patch3 is almost 100kB even compressed, as there were quite big changes
in the mm and minix fs.  No major new features: there are two new system
calls: swapoff(const char * swapfile) and wait4(), and linux accepts
several swap-files, but the rest of the thing is mostly bug-fixes or
simply rewrites.

Major changes:
 - new swap-page handling: linux no longer uses just one bit to keep
   track of used swap-space, but a counter for each...