Linux-2.1.125 ... pre-2.2 imminent

Linux-2.1.125 ... pre-2.2 imminent

It seems that I've finally found the mysterious bug that caused some SMP
machines to lock up at bootup if they had no keyboard enabled. It turns
out that the keyboard was a complete red herring, and that it just changed
timings of bottom half handling in particular. The real culprit was some
misguided locking attempts by the console driver at a really bad time.

Anyway, that means that the last of my personal show-stopper bugs in 2.1.x
seems to be finally history. I still expect to sync up with Alan Cox's
patches in particular, but I'm mentally getting ready for a real 2.2.

I still haven't decided on whether I'll make the same kind of "pre-2.2"
that I did before the 2.0 release, but there are strong psychological
reasons to do so to get people to more actively test it out with a "this
really should be stable" mindset.

In the meantime, there's now 2.1.125. Most of 2.1.125 is driver updates
for various things, most notably perhaps joystick and the new 5.10 version
of the Adaptec aic7xxx driver by Doug Ledford (but there are various other
driver updates). The fix for the mysterious lock-up is a few embarrassing
lines removed, but makes me feel a lot better ;)

Go forth, multiply, and fill the earth