patch3....

patch3....

Ok, I already announced it on the kernel mailing-list, but I might as
well go all the way. I put out patch3 to 0.96a yesterday, and it's
available on banjo in pub/Linux/Linus, and I'll upload it to the other
normal ftp-sites tonight.

NOTE! Patch3 is (like patch2) more of a kernel-hacker patch: it's just
in case you want to keep up with my kernel. It has some problems with
some serial lines, and if you experience them, I'd like to know what
type of chip you are running (and what linux reports on bootup). If you
don't think patching the kernel is fun, you might as well forget this
and wait for a real release (next month?).

Patch 3 contains:

- support for attaching and detaching processes under gdb (but you need
  a gdb that knows about this).
- 16550A support
- full core-dumping (again, you need a gdb that supports it)
- sockets have no problems with non-root binding etc
- /dev/zero implemented (mknod /dev/zero c 1 5)

None of the patches are very big (the whole patch is 17kB compressed,
most of it attach/detach code), but they are all pretty useful.

The 16550A support means that with the appropriate chip you now should
be able to use the serial ports at much higher speeds, but as mentioned,
it seems to break on some machines.

The detaching isn't perfect yet (I noticed only after making the diffs
that I had forgotten to do some cleanups), but it's not generally a
problem (the code just forgets to give the process back to it's rightful
father).

The patch is relative to the pl2 kernel, so you have to use the earlier
patches first. This time, I've added the lib/itimer.c code.

16550A support was written by tdavis, the correct format of the
core-dumps was written by eric (who also wrote the attach/detach code I
used as an example when implementing it), /dev/zero was written by
almesber. Nice to see good patches: I just did the socket-thing and
rewrote the attaching to suit me.

            Linus