An error occurred fetching the project authors.
  1. 23 Nov, 2007 9 commits
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      Import 2.3.40pre2 · caec3863
      Linus Torvalds authored
      caec3863
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      Import 2.3.16 · 0d447745
      Linus Torvalds authored
      0d447745
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      Import 2.3.13pre2 · de7578b7
      Linus Torvalds authored
      de7578b7
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      Linux 2.3.7pre6 · 353ca85a
      Linus Torvalds authored
      Anybody who is interested in FS performance should take a look at the
      latest pre-patch of 2.3.7 (only pre-6 and possibly later: do NOT get any
      earlier versions. pre-5 still causes file corruption, pre-6 looks good so
      far).
      
      Careful, though: I fixed the problem that caused some corruption less than
      an hour ago, and while my tests indicate it all works fine, this is a very
      fundamental change. The difference to earlier kernels is:
      
       - ext2 (and some other block device filesystems that have been taught
         about it) uses write-through from the page cache instead of having a
         separate buffer cache and the page cache to maintain dirty state. This
         means much less memory pressure in certain situations, and it also
         means that we can avoid unnecessary copies.
       - the page cache has been threaded, so on SMP you can actually get
         noticeable speedups from processes that do concurrent file accesses.
       - lower-latency read paths, especially the cached case.
      
      Both of these are big, and fundamental changes. So don't mistake me when I
      say it is experimental: Ingo, David and I have been spending the last
      weeks (especialy Ingo, who deserves a _lot_ of credit for this all: I
      designed much of it, but Ingo made it a reality. Thanks Ingo) on making it
      do the right thing and be stable, but if you worry about not having
      backups you might not want to play with it even so. It took us this long
      just to make it work reliably enough that we can't find any obvious
      problems..
      
      The interesting areas are things like
       - writes to shared mappings now go blindingly fast. We're talking mondo
         cleanups here. We used to do really badly on this, now we do really
         well.
       - does bdflush still do the right thing? There may be a _lot_ of tweaking
         to do to get everything working at full capacity.
       - can people confirm that it is stable for everybody?
       - if anybody has 8-way machines etc, scalability is interesting. It
         should scale to 8-way no problem. We used to scale to 1-way, barely.
         Numbers?
       - fsync(). It doesn't work right now, but it should be easy to make it
         work well on big files etc - something we've never been able to do
         before (we used to lack the indexing from file to dirty blocks: now we
         have access to that quite automatically thanks to having the
         inode->page index in place, and the dirty blocks are right there)
      
      and I'd really appreciate comments from people, as long as people are
      aware that it _looks_ stable but we don't guarantee anything at this
      point.
      
                      Linus
      353ca85a
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      pre-2.1.132-2.. · bd9c5382
      Linus Torvalds authored
      ..is out there, and has everybodys favourite fix, ie the version number
      has been bumped this time. In addition, compared to pre-1, it has:
       - autofs fix (uninitialized inode number could lead to "interesting"
         problems)
       - some more NFS fixes (file truncation with pending write-backs this time)
       - disable_irq()/enable_irq() now nests properly, as Alan convinced me
         (quite rightly) that they have to nest in order to work sanely with
         shared interrupt and multiple CPU's and various other schenarios.
       - more merges from Alan, we're getting closer to being synched up.
      Most of the bulk of the thing is the irda stuff, that most people can
      ignore.
      
                      Linus
      bd9c5382
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      pre-104 · 17559565
      Linus Torvalds authored
      The bulk of the pre-patch is just some speeling error fixes, but there's a
      one-liner that gets rid of the double interrupts with level-triggered
      irq's on the IO-APIC, and that is known to have fixed one persons SCSI
      tape driver (the fact that there were problems with too many interrupts
      implies that something is slightly buggered in the driver, but..)
      
      This should also have a ne2000 driver that doesn't get a NULL pointer
      fault for some people, and the irq changes should hopefully make it work
      on UP systems again even if the kernel is compiled as SMP.
      And there are some MTRR updates.
      
                      Linus
      17559565
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      Linux 2.1.103 · 05d033de
      Linus Torvalds authored
      >   I finnaly get the IRQ detection working with this patch,
      >  in linux-2.1.102/arch/i386/kernel/irq.c :
      Ok, does it still work with 2.1.103?
      2.1.103 has this patch, and also changes certain other things wrt interrupts in
      a way that both Edgar and Ingo seem to agree on, and it's been stable on
      certain boxes where plain 2.1.102 wasn't.
      
      2.1.103 also disables the early Cyrix cpuid stuff, because we now seem to
      have confirmation that this is what corrupts DMA IDE transfers (the cyrix
      code steps on magic motherboard IO ports - which Intel probably put there
      specially to mess with Cyrix. But maybe I'm just cynical). So people that
      have had problems with disk corruption and are brave enough to try, this
      could be an interesting experiment.
      [ Thanks to Gerard Roudier and Alan Cox for chasing down the IDE
        corruption issue, btw ]
      
                      Linus
      05d033de
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      Import 2.1.101 · e948921e
      Linus Torvalds authored
      e948921e
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      Linux 2.1.80 · 07e15ef7
      Linus Torvalds authored
      This release should fix a few networking problems, and the NFS client is
      hopefully fairly stable even under the kinds of loads we have here at
      Transmeta.
      
      The 2.1.80 release also contains some initial ARM support, and contains
      Ingo Molnar's better SMP interrupt handling.
      
      NOTE NOTE NOTE! The new SMP interrupt handling is currently not very good
      at autodetection. This can be a real problem, and _before_ booting the
      2.1.80 kernel as compiled for SMP you should probably try to figure out a
      possible IRQ override line by doing:
      
              echo -n pirq=; echo `scanpci -f | grep T_L | cut -c56-` | sed 's/ /,/g'
      which for me gives
              pirq=0x00,0x09,0x0b
      
      Then, after doing the above, boot into 2.1.80 and see if it finds your PCI
      interrupt lines correctly. If it does, everything is fine. If it doesn't,
      you need to boot with the pirq setting that you determined earlier, by
      giving the kernel the pirq data at the bootup command line or by using the
      LILO "append=" feature (or similar features in other bootloaders).
      We'll certainly have to make the autodetection work reliably, but in the
      meantime the command-line approach at least gives us a way to test the
      more fundamental impacts of better interrupt handling.
      
                      Linus
      07e15ef7