[PATCH] Linux-0.99.5 (February 9, 1993)

[PATCH] Linux-0.99.5 (February 9, 1993)

net-1: more fixes, use bottom halves for transmitting, more "volatiles"
to hide bugs. /proc interfaces for networking.

Side note: it took networking a _long_ time to recover from the
volatiles.  Getting the locking right rather than trying to make the
compiler make races smaller was a hard idea to get through.

Bill Metzenthen moves his math emulator to "beta 1.0" status.

Fred van Kempen shows up: starting to do a SLIP line discipline for tty
devices.

Verify FP exception handling.

[Original announcement below]

        "He's done it yet again - doesn't he ever rest?"
                        - anonymous linux kernel hacker

Only complete newbies don't know what this is all about, but I'd better
tell you anyway: patchlevel 5 of the 0.99 kernel is now available on
nic.funet.fi (pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus) as both context diffs against
pl4 and complete source code.  I'm not even going to speculate on 1.0
right now.

The pl5 diffs are about 90kB compressed: the major changes are to the
tcp/ip code and the serial driver, while there are various minor fixes
strewn around the system:

 - serial lines/tty changes (tytso & Fred v Kempen)
 - NFS bugfixes (Rick Sladkey)
 - tcp/ip (Ross Biro)
 - coprocessor handling changes (me)
 - harddisk driver error handling (Mika Liljeberg)
 - various minor patches (me and others)

Serial lines now implement non-blocking opens correctly and support
dial-out lines (same minor, major==5).  I changed the default startup
mode to be CLOCAL so that people won't get confused by the modem line
code when not using dial-in.

Another interesting change is the 387 error-coupling tests at bootup:
the code to check if the intel-recommended exception 16 error reporting
is present is "non-obvious".  If you have had problems with coprocessor
error handling, or have a non-intel coprocessor, I'd suggest you test
this out: I'd like to hear about problems/successes.

                Linus

PS.  If you tested out the latest ALPHA-diffs (the ones that already
changed the kernel version to pl5), the changes to the final pl5 were
only cosmetic.