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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.

More net-1 work. It's endless.

XT harddisk support by Pat Mackinlay.

sys_fsync() and SysV IPC code sys_ipc() stubs appear.

[original announcement below]

I don't generally announce ALPHA-diffs to quite this large an audience,
but I'll be partying^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hunavailable for the rest of the
week, and it's unlikely that I will be able to check mails or the
newsgroups until the start of April.  As a result, I'm putting up my
latest kernel version for ftp as it fixes some things in 0.99.7.

The ALPHA-diffs can be found on nic.funet.fi: in the directory
pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus.  If you dislike patching, you can get the
full sources in "linux-0.99.7A.tar.z", or just get the diff file
"ALPHA-diff.z".

Changes in this release:
- the new kernel now detects the lock-up condition at startup if you
  have a faulty 386/387 coupling, and will use software floating point
  in that case.
- the Xia filesystem is updated to the latest version
- the DOS filesystem is updated to the latest version
- the XT disk driver is included: I haven't been able to test it, but
  at least it won't bother anybody if you don't configure it in..
- the latest serial diffs are in
- minor ultrastor fixes
- some changes to the keyboard and line printer drivers: I hope the
  keyboard lockups that some people have reported would be gone with
  this release.
- some fixes to arp.c

I'll be interested in success/failure reports, although I won't be able
to answer them for some time (and I might miss some of the posts on
c.o.l).

            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