• Linus Torvalds's avatar
    [PATCH] Linux-0.98.4 (November 9, 1992) · 3820d961
    Linus Torvalds authored
    Rename "malloc()/free()" as "kmalloc()/kfree()" to make people more
    aware of some of the limitations.
    
    Math emulator updates to handle the case that Linux (unlike the original
    djgpp target) can get preempted by user space accesses.
    
    Make "ll_rw_blk()" take an array of blocks to read/write.
    
    VFS "notify_change()" callback, to allow the low-level filesystem to
    decide what it wants to do about metadata changes.
    
    Deprecate old "stat()" call by printing out a warning on use.
    
    NR_OPEN is now 256 files per process, and the old "unsigned long" bitops
    needed to go away. This causes lots of syntactic changes in select().
    
    System call tracing implemented for ptrace().
    
    [Original announcement below]
    
     - the inode caching bug (resulting in bad filesystem info when
       mounting/umounting devices) should be gone for good.
    
     - an elusive race-condition in the fs is fixed: this may have been the
       reason some people got fsck errors once in a while.  The
       race-condition was pretty hard to find, and depends on a lot of
       things (buffer cache size, speed of the disk and computer speed).
    
     - fpu emulator patches (mainly for the re-entrancy problem) by me and
       W. Metzenthen.
    
     - various wait-queue changes - the kernel uses the waiting mechanism
       more efficiently now.
    
     - the NFS client support code is there: the actual nfs code is still in
       alpha (although reported to be pretty stable) and has to be gotten
       separately.
    
     - NR_OPEN was changed from 32 to 256 (which is what SunOS seems to use,
       so I hope it won't need any further changes).  This has lead to some
       incompatibilities (GNU emacs and the term program seem to need
       recompilation to work correctly), as the 'select()' system call has a
       slightly changed interface due to the new fd_set definition.
    
     - the process kernel stack is now on a separate page (needed due to the
       fact that the task_struct has now grown to almost 3kB due to the
       NR_OPEN changes).  This also means 'ps' needs patches..  My patches
       to ps-0.98 are available as 'ps-diff.Z' in the same directory as the
       kernel sources and diffs.
    
     - various other changes: system call tracing by Ross Biro. Changed
       ll_rw_block interface (performance reasons: it will eventually be
       changed to accept several requests at once).  Malloc() was changed
       and renamed to kmalloc() due to the new interface.  Some tcp/ip
       patches (inode counting correction and some other changes).
    
    0.98.4 should hopefully be pretty stable: the main problem areas are
    probably still tcp/ip and some of the tty code.  I'd appreciate
    comments, bug-reports etc.
    
                    Linus
    3820d961
fpu_emu.h 3.36 KB