Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:24 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
Linux 1.0
CHANGES since 0.99 patchlevel 15:
- removed all the bugs, of course.
- networking fixes.
- more changes than I really wanted..
[original announcement below]
Linux 1.0---A better UNIX than Windows NT
Summary: Linux 1.0 released
Keywords: Linux Kernel 1.0 Academy Awards
X-Moderator-Added-Keywords: universe, end of
Finally, here it is. Almost on time (being just two years late is
peanuts in the OS industry), and better than ever:
Linux kernel release 1.0
This release has no new major features compared to the pl15 kernels, but
contains lots and lots of bugfixes: all the major ones are gone, the
smaller ones are hidden better. Hopefully there are no major new ones.
The Linux kernel can be found as source on most of the Linux ftp-sites
under the names
linux-1.0.tar.gz (full source)
linux-1.0.patch.pl15.gz (patch against linux-0.99pl15)
linux-1.0.patch.alpha.gz (patch from linux-pre-1.0)
This release finally moves Linux out of Beta status and is meant as a
base for distributions to build on. It will neither change Linux'
status as FreeWare under the GPL, nor will it mean the end of
development on Linux. In fact many new features where held back for
later releases so that 1.0 could become a well tested and hopefully
stable release.
The Linux kernel wouldn't be where it is today without the help of lots
of people: the kernel developers, the people who did user-level programs
making linux useful, and the brave and foolhardy people who risked their
harddisks and sanity to test it all out. My thanks to you all.
(Editorial note: if you think this sounds too much like the Academy
Awards ceremony, just skip this: it's not getting any better.)
Thanks to people like Aaron Kushner, Danny ter Haar and the authors of
the AnwenderHandbuch (and others) who have helped me with hardware or
monetary donations (and to the Oxford Beer Trolls and others who took
care of the drinkware). And thanks to Dirk, who helped me write this
announcement despite my lazyness ("hey, it's just another release, who
needs an announcement anyway?").
To make a long and boring story a bit shorter and boring, here is at
least a partial list of people who have been helping make Linux what it
is today. Thanks to you all,
Krishna Balasubramanian <balasub@cis.ohio-state.edu>
Arindam Banerji <axb@cse.nd.edu>
Peter Bauer <100136.3530@compuserve.com>
Fred Baumgarten <dc6iq@insu1.etec.uni-karlsruhe.de>
Donald Becker <becker@super.org>
Stephen R. van den Berg <berg@pool.informatik.rwth-aachen.de>
Hennus Bergman <hennus@sky.nl.mugnet.org>
Ross Biro <bir7@leland.Stanford.Edu>
Bill Bogstad <bogstad@cs.jhu.edu>
John Boyd <boyd@cis.ohio-state.edu>
Andries Brouwer <aeb@cwi.nl>
Remy Card <Remy.Card@masi.ibp.fr>
Ed Carp <ecarp@netcom.com>
Raymond Chen <raymondc@microsoft.com>
Alan Cox <iiitac@pyr.swan.ac.uk>
Laurence Culhane <loz@holmes.demon.co.uk>
Wayne Davison <davison@borland.com>
Thomas Dunbar <tdunbar@vtaix.cc.vt.edu>
Torsten Duwe <Torsten.Duwe@informatik.uni-erlangen.de>
Drew Eckhardt <drew@cs.Colorado.EDU>
Bjorn Ekwall <bj0rn@blox.se>
Doug Evans <dje@cygnus.com>
Rik Faith <faith@cs.unc.edu>
Juergen Fischer <fischer@server.et-inf.fho-emden.de>
Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@sw.oz.au>
Ralf Flaxa <rfflaxa@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de>
Nigel Gamble <nigel%gamble.uucp@gate.net>
Philip Gladstone <philipg@onsett.com>
Bruno Haible <haible@ma2s2.mathematik.uni-karlsruhe.de>
Andrew Haylett <ajh@gec-mrc.co.uk>
Dirk Hohndel <hohndel@informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de>
Nick Holloway <alfie@dcs.warwick.ac.uk>
Ron Holt <ron@novell.com>
Rob W. W. Hooft <hooft@EMBL-Heidelberg.DE>
Michael K. Johnson <johnsonm@sunsite.unc.edu>
Fred N. van Kempen <waltje@uwalt.nl.mugnet.org>
Olaf Kirch <okir@monad.swb.de>
Ian Kluft <ikluft@thunder.sbay.org>
Rudolf Koenig <rfkoenig@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de>
Bas Laarhoven <bas@vimec.nl>
Warner Losh <imp@boulder.parcplace.com>
H.J. Lu <hjl@nynexst.com>
Tuomas J. Lukka <Tuomas.Lukka@Helsinki.FI>
Kai M"akisara <Kai.Makisara@vtt.fi>
Pat Mackinlay <pat@it.com.au>
John A. Martin <jmartin@csc.com>
Bradley McLean <brad@bradpc.gaylord.com>
Craig Metz <cmetz@tjhsst.edu>
William (Bill) Metzenthen <billm@vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au>
Rick Miller <rick@discus.mil.wi.us>
Corey Minyard <minyard@wf-rch.cirr.com>
Eberhard Moenkeberg <emoenke@gwdg.de>
Ian A. Murdock <imurdock@shell.portal.com>
Johan Myreen <jem@vipunen.hut.fi>
Stefan Probst <snprobst@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de>
Daniel Quinlan <quinlan@bucknell.edu>
Florian La Roche <rzsfl@rz.uni-sb.de>
Robert Sanders <gt8134b@prism.gatech.edu>
Peter De Schrijver <stud11@cc4.kuleuven.ac.be>
Darren Senn <sinster@scintilla.santa-clara.ca.us>
Chris Smith <csmith@convex.com>
Drew Sullivan <drew@lethe.north.net>
Tommy Thorn <Tommy.Thorn@daimi.aau.dk>
Jon Tombs <jon@gtex02.us.es>
Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Simmule Turner <simmy@digex.com>
Stephen Tweedie <sct@dcs.ed.ac.uk>
Thomas Uhl <uhl@sun1.rz.fh-heilbronn.de>
Juergen Weigert <jnweiger@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de>
Matt Welsh <mdw@sunsite.unc.edu>
Marco van Wieringen <mvw@mercury.mcs.nl.mugnet.org>
Stephen D. Williams <sdw@lig.net>
G\"unter Windau <gunter@mbfys.kun.nl>
Lars Wirzenius <lars.wirzenius@helsinki.fi>
Roger E. Wolff <wolff@dutecai.et.tudelft.nl>
Frank Xia <qx@math.columbia.edu>
Eric Youngdale <eric@tantalus.nrl.navy.mil>
Orest Zborowski <orestz@microsoft.com>
A more detailed list with contact and description information can be
found in the CREDITS file that accompanies the kernel sources.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:21 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
pl15a fixes the buffer cache growing problem, adds emulation for a
few unimportant floating point instructions (i287 instructions that
are No-Ops on the i387, so "emulating" them is easy :^) and fixes a
silly bug when mmap'ing stuff write-only. It also fixes a buggy lock
in the networking.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:21 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.99.15 (February 2, 1994)
sbpcd (Sound Blaster Pro CD interface) driver.
Andries Brouwer cleans up and re-does keyboard driver diacritical handling.
Lots of new sound drivers.
Sysvfs added (Xenix, SystemV/386 and Coherent support). Linux was
starting to have a lot of users move over..
MAP_ANONYMOUS flag added to mmap().
Loadable modules added.
Alan Cox is active in networking.
[original changelog below]
Linux 0.99.15 released: Codefreeze for 1.0
People who look into my directory on ftp.funet.fi will already have
noticed that the latest version of linux (0.99.15) is available, and I
assume it will be available on most other linux sites soon. As
explained in a previous announcement, 0.99.15 is "it", in that this will
be the base for 1.0 after about a month of testing. No further patches
are accepted until the 1.0 release, unless they obviously fix a serious
bug.
**** NOTE 1 ****
For this code-freeze to be effective yet still potential bugs be
found, testing is needed, along with good reports of errors and
problems. Thus, nobody should think "hey, the *real* release will be
out in a month, let's wait for that", but instead think: "hey, I'd
better test this one, so that the *real* release won't result in any
ugly surprises for me".
In short: test it out, preferably even more than you usually do. Run
"crashme" for the whole month if you have the CPU-power to spare,
and/or just misuse your machine as badly as you can. And if there are
problems, report them to me (and the better the report, the more
likely I am to be able to do something about it).
**** NOTE 2 ****
Bumping the linux version number to 1.0 doesn't mean anything more
than that: it's only a version number change. More explicitly, it
does *NOT* mean that linux will become commercial (the copyright will
remain as-is), nor does it mean that development stops here, and that
1.0 will be anything special in that respect.
I'm also afraid that just changing the version number will not make
potential bugs magically disappear: this has been amply proven by
various software houses over the years. This code-freeze is there in
order to avoid most of the problems that people sometimes associate
with "X.0 releases", and I hope that it will mean that we have a
reasonably stable release that we can call 1.0 and one that I won't
have to be ashamed of.
Ok, enough said, I hope. The pl15 release is hopefully good, but I'll
continue to make ALPHA patches against it along the whole month as
problems crop up. The networking code has been much maligned, and is
not perfect by far yet, but it's getting its act together thanks to
various developers and testers. And as wiser men than I have said (or
if they haven't, they should have):
"There is life after 1.0"
Any rumors that the world is coming to an end just because I'm about to
release a 1.0-version are greatly exaggerated. I think.
Linus
----------
Things that remained the same between 0.99.14 and 0.99.15:
- I again forgot to update the README before uploading the release. In
pl14, I talked about pl13, while the all new and improved README has
now caught up with pl14. Remind me to buy a new brain one of these
days.
Changes between versions 0.99.14 and 0.99.15:
- improved Pentium detection. Some of you may have had linux report
your 4086DX2 as a pentium machine, but the new kernel will tell you
the sad truth. Whee.
- Network driver updates by Donald Becker. New drivers added, old ones
updated.
- FPU emulation updates by Bill Metzenthen. Various minor errors and
misfeatures fixed (mostly error handling).
- Support for the SoubdBlaster Pro CD-ROM driver added by Eberhard
Moenkeberg.
- extended support for keyboard re-definition, along with font
re-programming (Eugene Crosser, Andries Brouwer et al).
- tty handling fixes: true canonical mode with most features supported
by Julian Cowley. This may make your canonical mode behave funnily
if you happen to use old and broken programs that happened to work
with the old and broken behaviour (this includes at least some
'getty' programs).
- serial driver changes and tty fixes by Theodore Ts'o.
- SCSI fixes by Drew Eckhardt, Eric Youngdale, Rik Faith, Kai Mdkisara
et al.
- Updated sound card driver to version 2.4 (Hannu Savolainen)
- COFF binary loading support (but you will still need the experimental
iBCS2 patches to run non-linux i386 COFF binaries) by Al Longyear.
- Upgraded ext2fs filesystem routines (0.4a -> 0.4b), with new
features. Read the fs/ext2/CHANGES file for details. Remy Card and
Stephen Tweedie. Get a new fsck that knows about the new features.
- pipe behaviour fixed in the presense of multiple writers (now
actually conforms to POSIX specs about atomic writes). Much of the
code by Florian Coosmann.
- minix filesystem extended to support the clean flag: get a new fsck
that knows about it.
- System V filesystem (support for Xenix, Coherent and SysV
filesystems) by Doug Evans, Paul Monday, Pascal Haible and Bruno
Haible.
- loadable modules (various authors, don't remember original author of
the "modules" code).
- Lots of networking fixes by various people: Alan Cox, Charles
Hedrick, me and various other people. Non-byte-aligned networks
work, and the networking code should be much stabler in general.
+ various bugfixes and enhacements here and there (mcd driver update by
Jon Tombs, atixlmouse fix by Chris Colohan, /dev/full by XXX etc etc)
All in all, the patches come out to 1.5MB uncompressed (about 400kB
gzip-9'd), so there is little or no idea to make patches to plain pl14
available. Incremental patches and ALPHA-releases can be found on
ftp.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus/ALPHA-pl14.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:19 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
This is a general announcement of the imminent code-freeze that will
hopefully make linux 1.0 a reality. The plan has been discussed a bit
with various developers already, and is already late, but is still in
effect otherwise.
In short, the next version of linux (0.99.15) will be a "full-featured"
release, and only obvious bug-fixes to existing features will be applied
before calling it 1.0. If this means that your favourite feature or
networking version won't make it, don't despair: there is life even
after beta (and it's probably not worth mailing me about it any more:
I've seen quite a few favourite features already ;-).
In fact, 1.0 has little "real meaning", as far as development goes, but
should be taken as an indication that it can be used for real work
(which has been true for some time, depending on your definition of
"real work"). Development won't stop or even slow down: some of it has
even been shelved pending a 1.0 already.
Calling it 1.0 will not necessarily make all bugs go away (quite the
opposite, judging by some other programs), but I hope it will be a
reasonably stable release. In order to accomplish this, the code-freeze
after 0.99.15 will be about a month, and I hope people will test out
that kernel heavily, instead of waiting for "the real release" so that
any potential bugs can be found and fixed.
As to where we are now: as of this moment, the latest release is the 'r'
version of pl14 (aka "ALPHA-pl14r"). I've made ALPHA releases available
on ftp.funet.fi almost daily, and expect a final pl15 within a few more
days. Testing out the ALPHA releases is not discouraged either if you
like recompiling kernels every day or two..
And finally: we also try to create a "credits" file that mentions the
developers of the kernel and essential linux utilities. The credit file
compilator is jmartin@opus.starlab.csc.com (John A. Martin), and if you
feel you have cause to be mentioned in it, please contact him.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:13 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.99.13 (September 19, 1993)
We get enable_irq()/disable_irq()
The C++ experiment is not going well. Get rid of the 'extern "C"', but
replace it with an "asmlinkage" #define that allows us to experiment.
ELF binary support it a notable change.
Original ChangeLog:
- the bad memory management one-liner bug in pl12 is naturally fixed.
- compiled with plain C by default instead of C++
- ELF binary support (Eric Youngdale)
- Quickport mouse support (and some changes to the PS/2 mouse driver)
by Johan Myreen and co)
- core file name change ("core" -> "core.xxxx" where xxxx is the name
of the program that dumped code). Idea from ???. Also, core-files
now correctly truncate any existing core file before being written.
- some mmap() fixes: better error returns, and handling of non-fixed
maps for /dev/mem etc.
- one kludgy way to fix the wrong arp packets that have plagued net-2d
(resulting in arp packets that had the first four bytes of the
ethernet address as the IP address).
- I fixed the mount-point handling of 'rename()' and 'unlink()/rmdir()'
so that they should now work and/or give appropriate error messages.
An early version of this patch was already sent to the KERNEL
channel, which fixed the rename problem but not a similar bug with
unlink.
- packet mode fixes by Charles Hedrick. Sadly, these are likely to
break old telnet/rlogin binaries, but it had to be done in order to
communicate correctly with the rest of the world.
- FPU emulator patches from Bill Metzenthen. The fprem1 insn should be
correct now (not that anybody seems to have seen the incorrect
behaviour..)
- a few fixes for SCSI (Drew and Eric)
- signal.c changes to handle multiple segments (for Wine) correctly.
- updated drivers from Donald Becker: 3c509 and AT1500 drivers, but
also some other drivers have been edited, and some networking fixes.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:12 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
Very small patch to 0.99pl12
I hate to put out patches this soon after a release, but there is one
potentially major problem in pl12 which is very simple to fix.. I'm
including patches: both in plain ascii and as a uuencoded gzip file
(it's the same patch - the uuencoded one is in case there is any
newsserver that messes up whitespace).
The main patch is just the change from __get_free_page(GFP_BUFFER) into
get_free_page(GFP_KERNEL), and the two minor patches just add checks
that actually enforce the read-only nature of current file mmap'ings so
that any program that tries to do a write mapping at least will be told
that it won't work.
I'd suggest anybody compiling pl12 should add at least the file_table.c
patch: thanks to Alexandre Julliard for noticing this one.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:12 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.99.12 (August 14, 1993)
CDU31A and MCD CD-ROM drivers. Ahh, the bad old days of every sound
card manufacturer having their own CD interface.
Much nicer keymaps for keyboards.
Many more network drivers by Donald Becker for the improving NET-2 code.
Eric Youngdale makes executables and libraries use the new mmap()
functionality. The old special-cased sharing goes away. Hurray! This
also means that mmap gets a lot more testing. It also means that NFS
has to be fixed to allow mmaps. Done.
"sys_modify_ldt()" appears, the extended DOS emulators want it.
Still using C++ to compile the kernel.
Original changelog:
- The memory manager cleanup has continued, and seems to be mostly
ready, as proven by the ease of adding mmap() over NFS with the new
routines. So yes, the pl12 kernel will demand-load your binaries
over NFS, sharing code and clean data, as well as running shared
libraries over NFS. Memory management by Eric and me, while the NFS
mmap code was written by Jon Tombs,
- ** IMPORTANT **: The keyboard driver has been enhanced even further,
and almost everything is completely re-mappable. This means that
there is a new version of 'loadkeys' and 'dumpkeys' that you must use
with this kernel or you'll have problems. The default keyboard is
still the US mapping, but if you want to create your own mappings
you'll have to load them with the new binaries. Get the 'kbd.tar.gz'
archive from the same place you get the kernel.
The new keymappings allow things like function key string changes,
remapping of the control keys, and freedom to remap any of the normal
keyboard functions: including special features like rebooting,
console switching etc. The keyboard remapping code has been done
mostly by Risto Kankkunen (Risto.Kankkunen@Helsinki.FI).
- updated network drivers by Donald Becker
- updated serial drivers - tytso@Athena.mit.edu
- updated 387 emulation (Bill Metzenthen). The updated emulator code
has more exact trigonometric functions and improved exception
handling. It now behaves very much like a real 486, with only small
changes (greater accuracy, slightly different denormal NaN handling
etc - hard to detect the differences even if you are looking for
them).
- network timer fixes by Florian La Roche (much cleaned up net/inet/timer.c
and some bad race-conditions fixed).
- Scsi code updates by Eric Youngdale and others
- Sony CDU-31A CDROM driver by Corey Minyard added to the standard
kernel distribution.
- The Mitsumi CDROM driver is now part of the standard kernel. Driver
by Martin Harriss with patches by stud11@cc4.kuleuven.ac.be (yes, he
probably has a real name, but no, I haven't found it) and Jon Tombs.
- various other minor patches (preliminary ldt support etc)
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:12 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
PATCH: fork.c bug in 0.99.pl11
There is at least one known problem with 0.99pl11 - it's very minor and
will not lead to any real problems, but it's also very easy to fix,
so...
The problem is a one-liner oversight in kernel/fork.c (thanks to TjL for
noticing the symptoms - they aren't easy to see), which is fixed by the
following patch:
In fact, it's probably easiest to "apply" this patch by hand: just
change the "p->tss.fs = KERNEL_DS" in fork.c to "p->tss.fs = USER_DS"
and you should be fine.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:11 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.99.11 (July 17, 1993)
Real file mmap with page sharing in the VM code. We don't do writable
shared mappings (and we won't do them for a _long_ time yet), but this
is a big step forward!
Note in the COPYING file that the GPL only covers the kernel, not user
programs. People were starting to find Linux more and more interesting..
Improved configure script.
Use nicer "save_flags()/cli()/restore_flags()" macros instead of
hardcoding the inline assembly. Clean up other inline assembly usage
too.
Trying to compile the kernel with C++ compiler. It will be a failed
experiment.
Original ChangeLog:
- The keyboard is dynamically changeable (this is true of pl10 as
well), and you need to get the "keytables.tar.z" archive to set the
keyboard to suit your taske unless you want to live with the default
US keymaps.
Use the "loadkeys map/xxx.map" command to load the keyboard map: you
can edit the maps to suit yourself if you can't find a suitable one.
The syntax of the keyboard maps should be obvious after looking at
the examples.
- The memory manager has been cleaned up substantially, and mmap()
works for MAP_PRIVATE. MAP_SHARED is still not supported for
anything else than /dev/mem, but even so it actually is usable for a
lot of applications. The shared library routines have been rewritten
to use mmap() instead of the old hardcoded behaviour.
- The kernel is now compiled with C++ instead of plain C. Very few
actual C++ features are used, but even so C++ allows for more
type-checking and type-safe linkage.
- The filesystem routines have been cleaned up for multiple block
sizes. None of the filesystems use it yet, but people are working on
it.
- named pipes and normal pipes should hopefully have the right select()
semantics in the presense/absense of writers.
- QIC-02 tape driver by Hennus Bergman
- selection patches in the default kernel
- fixed a bug in the pty code which led to busy waiting in some
circumstances instead of sleeping.
- Compressed SLIP support (Charles Hedrick). See net/inet/CONFIG
- the 'clear_bit()' function was changed to return the previous setting
of the bit instead of the old "error-code". This makes use of the
bit operations more logical.
- udelay() function for short delays (busy-waiting) added. Used
currently only by the QIC driver.
- fork() and sheduler changes to make task switches happen only from
kernel mode to kernel mode. Cleaner and more portable than the old
code which counted on being able to task-switch directly into user
mode.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:11 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.99.10 (June 7, 1993)
People finally gave up on net-1, Ross Biro grew tired of the flames, and
net-2 appears with Fred van Kempen as maintainer. This is the big
switch-over version.
fsync() isn't just a stub any more, and System V IPC is also showing up.
The "struct file" filetable is made dynamic, instaed of a static
allocation. For the first time you can have _lots_ of files open.
Stub for iBCS2 emulation code.
[original announcement below]
I've finally released an official version of linux-0.99 patchlevel 10:
there have been various alpha versions floating around which differ in
details (notably networking code), which shouldn't be used any more.
The new linux version is available only as full source code: the diffs
would have been too big to be useful. You can find linux-0.99.10.tar.z
(along with keytables.tar.z) on nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus
and probably on tsx-11 and other linux archives within a day or two (so
check there first if you are in the states).
Linux-0.99 pl10 has a number of new features and changes in interface.
The most notable of these are:
- the networking code is reorganized (generally called "net-2",
although unrelated to the BSD release). The new code implements a
lot of standard features lacking in net-1, and also changes the user
interface to be closer to the BSD standards. Notably, the old
configuration binaries won't work, so to get the new networking to
work you'll have to get the net-2 binaries as well. The networking
binaries are available on tsx-11.mit.edu (and mirrors) under the
directory pub/linux/packages/net/net-2 (and the setup syntax has
changed somewhat..)
The networking code has been mainly organized and rewritten by Fred
van Kempen, with drivers by Donald Becker.
- serial line setup has been changed: linux 0.99 pl10 does *not* try to
autodetect serial ports very agressively. If you have other serial
ports than the standard com1/com2, or nonstandard IRQ etc values,
this means that it's less likely to work without any help. The
solution is not to recompile the kernel - you should get the
"setserial" program available from tsx-11.mit.edu in the directory
pub/linux/sources/sbin/setserial-2.01.tar.z that allows you to
dynamically configure your serial ports to suit your setup.
The main organizer behind the serial line changes is tytso (Theodore
Ts'o).
- Keyboard setup has changed: it is no longer hardcoded at compile
time, but instead you can use the new "loadkeys" program to load in a
new keyboard map on the fly. The default keyboard map is the normal
US keyboard (yes, I should have used the Finnish one by default, but
after thinking of all the problems that would have resulted in I
forgot about that idea). The loadkeys code can be found in the
"keytables.tar.z" archive, which also contains keymaps for most
normal keyboard types. To create a custom keyboard table is very
easy - just take a 5 minute look at the existing map files (they
resemble the ones used by xmodmap, so if you are familiar with
those..)
The loadable keymaps were mostly implemented by Risto Kankkunen.
There are a lot of other internal kernel changes, but they should be
mostly transparent, and noticeable only indirectly due to new features
or (hopefully) better/faster/whatever operation. These include:
- the SysV IPC patches are in by default: Krishna Balasubramanian.
If you need these, you know what it's about (notably, dosemu 0.49
wants them).
- inode handling is updated: inodes and files are now dynamically
allocated within the kernel, and use a hash table for faster lookup
(along with a NFU algorithm for the inode cache). Steven Tweedie.
- Updated FPU emulation: mostly exception handling changes, making the
emulator handle most exceptions the same way a 486 does. The
emulator is written by Bill Metzenthen.
- a few ext2-fs updates by Remy Card and Steven Tweedie.
- support for the 'fsync()' function (Steven Tweedie)
- various (minor) SCSI patches to catch some error conditions, add
support for VLB adaptec controllers without DMA and so on (different
people).
- other changes - I forget.
In addition to patches sent in by others, I've naturally made my own
changes (often *to* the patches sent in by others :-). Among other
things, the pl10 buffer cache code now also tries to share pages with
executables, resulting in better cacheing especially of binaries (giving
noticeable improvements in kernel recompilation speed on some machines).
Also, I've changed a lot of low-level things around to help the iBCS2
project: this includes things like internal segment handling and the
signal stack (which now looks the same as on SysV i386 unixes). All in
all, pl10 has a disturbing amount of new code, but will hopefully work
well despite (due to?) the number of changes.
The new networking code in particular will change the network setup a
lot - it now looks more standard, but if you were used to the old way of
doing things.. On the other hand, most people actively using the
networking features have hopefully gotten warnings about this on the NET
channel for the last few weeks. Also, the networking code still isn't
perfect: Fred is still working on it, but it seems to have reached a
reasonably stable platform on which it will be easier to build. Look
out for the new-and-improved networking manual, hopefully out soon(?).
Standard request: please try it all out, give it a real shakedown, and
send comments/bug-reports to the appropriate place (I'm always
appropriate, but you may want to send the report to the mailing lists
and/or the newsgroup as well). I apologize for the lateness of the
release (forcing hlu to make interim gcc releases that relied on
nonstandard kernels etc), and the changes are somewhat bigger than I'd
prefer, so the more testerts that try it out, the faster we can try to
fix any possible problems. The new kernel has gone through various
stages of ALPHA-diffs and some late ALPHA-pl10's, so there shouldn't be
any major surprises, but alpha releases tend not to get even close to
the coverage a real release gets...
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:10 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.99.9 (April 23, 1993)
Bill's math emulator now passes paranoia.
Last argument to ioctl is "long".
sys_clone() appears.
[original announcement below]
The latest kernel release is 0.99.9, and can be found on nic.funet.fi:
pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus, both as patches relative to pl8 and as full
sources. The only major new feature is that the ST-0x driver has
finally been updated to the scatter-gather code: ST-0x users should with
luck get about 5 times the performance on disk-operations.. Seagate
code written by Drew Eckhardt.
0.99.9 also fixes:
- the FPU-emulator should now handle all rounding-modes correctly, and
pass all the paranoia package tests. Patches by Bill Metzenthen.
- bootup enhancements by Chrisoph Niemann (but the SVGA mode numbers
have changed, so you may have to edit your lilo configuration file
and/or the main Makefile to get the mode you normally want)
- ext2fs updated to the very latest release. Code by Remy Card and
Stephen Tweedie.
- various minor patches, some of them cosmetic, some of them fixes to
smaller bugs.. Thanks to everybody who sent them in (even though not
all made it)
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:10 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.99.8 (April 8, 1993)
Mount root filesystem read-only (conditional for now).
SCSI updates.
Stephen Tweedie shows up in ext2, with an enhanced block allocator.
Signal handling update with generated code on the stack and a
"sigreturn" system call. This was needed to maintain compatibility in
the face of a changed stack layout. sigsuspend() also works correctly now.
[original announcement below]
Yet another kernel release is now available on nic.funet.fi in the usual
place (pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus for those of you that have already
forgotten), and will probably show up on the other ftp-sites within a
day or two. There are two new files:
linux-0.99.8.tar.z - the full gzipped and tarred source-tree of the
linux kernel.
linux-0.99.patch8.z - unified diffs against the last official release
(0.99pl7).
There is no SLIP or new networking routines in this kernel despite the
rumors that have been flying around - the main changes to 0.99.7 are
(some of them were in 0.99pl7A as well):
- the signal handling code has been extensively reworked, and should be
POSIX as well as clean.
- dosfs is upgraded to version 12 (Werner Almesberger)
- xiafs is upgraded to the latest version (Qi Xia)
- ext2fs is upgraded to the latest version (Remy Card/Stephen Tweedie)
- FPU-emulation patches for v86 mode and precision rounding (Bill
Metzenthen)
- SCSI patches by various people (Eric Youngdale & co)
- XT harddisk support (Pat Mackinlay)
- new trial code to try to handle 387 lockups on some systems more
gracefully.
- keyboard, lp and serial driver fixes
- various minor changes (mounting root read-only, bootup messages
cleaned up etc)
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:10 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.99.7A (March 21, 1993)
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 Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:09 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.99.7 (March 13, 1993)
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 Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:09 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.99.6 (February 21, 1993)
Merge a lot of duplicated special file handling into fs/devices.c, and
make drivers register their major numbers properly.
VFS layer gets fsync virtual function.
Compressed image boot, with the kernel loaded into high memory..
[original announcement below]
I'm starting soon to run out of patchlevel numbers for 0.99, but I made
a new release anyway (and long-time linux hackers remember my less than
completely logical numbering: when I run out of numbers I'll start using
alphabetical characters and other fun characters to indicate new
versions :-)
0.99pl6 is mainly a syncronization release: it fixes a few bugs and
changes the behaviour of 'vhangup()' to be more standard. The vhangup()
changes will break some init/login stuff that depended on the earlier
incorrect behaviour - not everybody may want to use pl6 until you are
sure your init/login will work happily with it. Better do these things
before 1.0 than to break it later.
Patchlevel 6 also changes the vfs functions for special devices as well
as adding a 'fsync' field to the inode-operations structure. Thus
ext2fs and xfs need updating. Remy and Xia? The special file and fifo
handling code is no longer supposed to be in the fs-dependent layer, but
is handled by the vfs routines, as it's the same for all "normal"
filesystems.
Ok, here are the actual changes/features of pl6:
- the kernel can be loaded in gzipped format and de-compressed at
startup beyond the 1MB mark. Good for bootable rootdisks. Patches
mainly by Hannu Savolainen.
- I finally enabled NMI's everywhere (except at the bootup sequence),
so if you have memory errors, they will hopefully now result in
kernel messages ("NMI received..")
- the device registration code for special devices. Special files are
now registered with a special "register_[chr|blk]dev()" function.
- consolidated fifo/special dev handling
- vhangup patches. Note that these may break init/login badly, at
least if you are using poeigl-1.7. Be careful that you don't get
totally locked out of your machine.
- the procfs NULL-dereferencing bugfix (michaelkjohnson)
- literal next character handling (very losely based on a patch I
received: I essentially rewrote it with final fixes by jrs).
- fpu-emu bugfixes by Bill Metzenthen - fixes the "internal error 112"
bug as well as a sign bug with zero.
- fdomain driver fixes
- various other minor fixes (wrongly replying to bad ip messages etc)
I'm still not sure about the 387 error detection code: I have had a
couple of messages that would suggest that some early clone 387's have
problems with math exceptions in protected mode. With the new (as of
99pl5) test at startup this can lead to problems at boot-time. Please
mail me directly if you seem to have problems with this (it should be
obvious in pl6 due to debugging messages at startup).
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:09 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[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.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:08 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.99.4 (January 20, 1993)
net-1: random addition of "volatile" keywords to try to hide race
conditions in the code.
File locking updated with shared and exclusive locks for BSD flock.
Re-mounting of filesystems and new mount system call.
Re: Freeze up on X
In article <1993Jan21.181502.23485@miles.com> dennisf@miles.com (Dennis Flaherty) writes:
>
>Here's another clue. Try this: when your system freezes, running X, try
>MOVING THE MOUSE. It's weird!! But moving the mouse actually makes the
>system run! Stop moving the mouse, and the system freezes again. And
>this only happens with 0.99.3, not 0.99.2.
Get pl4, and it should be gone. There was a bug in the handling of
uninitialized interrupts in pl3, where they could result in either the
wrong interrupt mask being loaded leading to interrupt lock-out or (in
some cases) bit corruption at the user level. The symptoms are exactly
as you describe: a good interrupt that didn't happen to be locked out
will correct the interrupt mask, and the system goes on (it can be
moving the mouse, but it might also be a keyboard event etc).
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:08 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.99.3 (January 13, 1993)
VFS gets "permission()" virtual function.
[Original announcement below]
Still no 1.0 - I have had a couple of reports of problems, so I'll make
yet another 0.99 release. The diffs (against 0.99.2) and complete
source can be found at nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus as usual,
and will probably show up at the other sites pretty soon.
0.99.3 contains no real new features, but the diffs are pretty big
anyway (100kB+ compressed): various things have moved around a bit and
there are a lot of minor changes. The changes include (but are not
limited to):
- the math emulator code now also understands the unofficial codes (in
case somebody followed the ML math emulator thread). I'd be
interested to hear whether ML now works with the emulator.
- various SCSI driver changes
- some re-organization of the tty open/close code to remove a few race
conditions.
- interrupt handling rewrites (two-level interrupt code cleanups)
- the serial drivers are tytso's alpha-drivers: they aren't quite
completed, but as they need the interrupt handling patches to get
ready, this is probably the least traumatic way of doing it.
- some more minor keyboard driver changes (mostly taking advantage of
the two-level interrupts)
+ a lot of other minor changes. I once more hope people will try it
out, and report any problems or successes to me.
Known problems:
- there seems to be something weird going on in the ST-0x driver with
some scsi disks.
- tcp/ip is reportedly still not quite stable, and I can't even test it
out.
NOTE! The DMA functions have changed for the high DMA channels - all DMA
functions now take their arguments as the number of bytes instead of the
old way of using bytes for ch 0-3 and words for ch 5-7. This might lead
to problems with the SoundBlaster driver, which may need editing.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:08 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.99.2 (January 1, 1993)
Bottom half race condition fix.
Return ENODEV for nonexistent special devices.
Fix Unix domain sockets to properly check for target equality.
Add 'wchan' to /proc/stat
[Original announcement below]
Yes, as you've probably noticed, it's now 1993 and I still haven't
released 1.0. Sorry about that, and I have only another patchlevel to
offer. The new kernel should mainly fix some of the keyboard problems
people have experienced, but does contain some other minor fixes.
Linux 0.99.2 is available now at nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus
as both sources and diffs against 0.99.1 the diffs are essentially the
same as the second alpha-diffs I released for limited testing, with only
minor fixes to fs/exec.c and fs/open.c.
Please try out 0.99.2: the more feedback (hopefully positive) I get on
it, the faster 1.0 will be out.
Changes from pl1 are mainly:
- pretty much rewritten low-level keyboard handling IO - this time
actually trying to do it by the book. It now handles resend requests
from the keyboard etc.
- you can run executables from filesystems without bmap support. This
mainly means NFS and msdos. Note that while it's possible, it's
slower and less memory-efficient than using a "normal" linux
filesystem, and should generally be avoided.
- /proc filesystem changes: /proc/kmsg can be used to log the kernel
messages under X11 (instead of using the older system call to do the
same), and there are changes to the statistics routines (WCHAN).
+ various minor fixes (non-existent devices are handled better, some
changes to socket bind behaviour etc).
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:08 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.99.1 (December 21, 1992)
Patch 1 addresses the following problems:
- configuration. Hope there are no silly problems left..
- inode.c: initialization changes (the missing NULL and some other
minor fixes).
- some SCSI tape driver patches (Kai M{kisara)
- tcp/ip patches (Ross Biro, some code by me)
- keyboard patches (mainly changed initialization - hope the keyboard
lockups are gone).
- completed /proc-fs: it should now contain all info needed by 'ps'
(Micheal K Johnson).
- various minor fixes (the minix-fs link overflow checking etc)
Patch1 also contains support for extended VC switching - this is for the
upcoming X11 that understands VC's. One result of this is that console
redirection now redirects *only* messages actually sent to /dev/console
(aka /dev/tty0), not just to any foreground VC. Wait for Xfree-1.2 to
be able to switch VC's while under X (yes, including several X-sessions
active at the same time..).
I hope there are still people out there that aren't too busy stuffing
themself with turkey to try out a new kernel release. There is just
over a week left of this year, and I need feedback in order to be able
to release 1.0.
Linus
PS. Thanks to everybody who has sent me Christmas/New Year/Birthday
cards. Some contained money, some didn't, and I enjoyed them all.
Thanks.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:07 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.99 (December 13, 1992)
net-1: paranoid queue checking to find more bugs.
configuration script version #1.
NFS filesystem client support by Rick Sladkey!
[Original announcement below]
0.99 has no major new features: the NFS client code is now in the
standard distribution, and the kernel configuration has changed, but
most of the rest of the changes are fixes - especially the tcp code
should now be pretty stable (knock wood).
Changes:
- NFS is in. As are some stubs for the soud drivers, although it's only
stubs right now.
- various fixes around the place: the serial problems are hopefully
gone, and there are patches to both TCP/IP and SCSI to make them more
stable.
- Minor fixes: the keyboard buglet introduced in 0.98pl6 should be
gone, and some other bugs are also corrected. The optimized
read-ahead code in the filesystems (and the raw device read code) was
too complicated and seemed to have problems with bad blocks, so I
rewrote it, and it should hopefully work correctly now (this may have
been the reason "mkfs -c" didn't work in all cases). Thanks for some
good bug-reports I've gotten: I've tried to correct all the problems
I got reports on.
- The kernel configuration has been re-thought: I decided to take
advantage of the possibilities offered by GNU make etc. This means
that you no longer can compile the kernel using any other make, but
there probably aren't many (if any) people doing that anyway. This
way I got rid of the extremely ugly SCSI setup, so it was probably
worth it.
To configure the kernel for your setup, do a
make config
and answer the yes/no questions. After that, do a
make dep
to make the dependencies match your setup. After that you should still
go edit the top-level Makefile for some of the configuration information
as before, but the remaining config things are pretty simple. Then you
can make the kernel with a simple "make Image".
The new configuration utility (essentially a stupid shell script coupled
with some smarts in the Makefiles) tries to minimize compilations: if
you disable the SCSI code the scsi drivers won't even be compiled, much
less linked in. This should be a win on slower machines.
NOTE!!! Use LILO-0.7 to load the 0.98pl5 and newer kernels: any older
version of lilo is liable to result in weird problems.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:07 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.98.6 (December 2, 1992)
Kai Makisara does the SCSI tape driver. He's one of the few original
maintainers still around as such..
isofs introduced by Eric Youngdale, based on the minixfs code. Eric was
a physicist, and you can tell he was new to C - he has been
Pascal-damaged, and has extra semi-colons at the end of block
statements. But soon he ended up being one of the core maintainers
anyway, and took over SCSI maintenance.
More aggressive filesystem read-ahead introduced.
[Original announcement below]
Anyway, 0.98pl6 is hopefully the last release before 0.99: there are a
few known problems left in this release. Most notable is the serial
code: it works for most people, but others still have problems with it.
I hope this will get fixed within a week (tytso is working on it). It
also seems as if the PS/2 mouse code has some problems.
pl6 contains these fixes:
- all the tcp/ip patches I've received (and I fixed one bug that
gcc-2.3 seems to have found).
- math-emu patch for the problem that resulted in FPU errors with some
operations.
- I fixed gcc-2.3 warnings as well as most of the old warnings. You
shouldn't get more than one or two warnings when recompiling the
whole kernel.
- /proc filesystem extensions. Based on ideas (and some code) by
Darren Senn, but mostly written by yours truly. More about that
later.
- some tty_io fixes (there was a bug in the /dev/console handling when
you changed VC's while using the general console device).
- re-organization of the keyboard-driver internal data-structures. The
changes are mostly preliminary: they change the keyboard flags to be
more easily adaptive to a reprogrammable keyboard driver. No actual
new features yet.
- new SCSI drivers: reportedly much faster than the old ones (but not
all drivers take advantage of it yet..)
- various other fixes: pty's etc have minor changes.
I hope to make 0.99 in a week or so, and 1.0 after that has been tested
some. I hope people will test out pl6 - 0.99 won't be much different,
and if you don't test pl6, any bugs relating to your particular hardware
may not be found in time for 0.99...
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:07 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.98.5 (November 15, 1992)
net-1: free_skb -> kfree_skb. More changelogs.
[Original announcement below]
0.98.5 mainly fixes the swap-partition bug that was present in pl4 (and
for which I did an earlier unofficial emergency patch). The bug
resulted in incorrect swapping with a partition under some circumstances
(notably tty events: keypresses could make xterm dump code when swapping
was enabled etc).
pl5 also has some other changes - nothing major. Setting and querying
termios information from a pty master will now set/query the slave info:
this seems to be what some programs (telnet) expect. I haven't seen any
changes to any of the programs I use, but I'd like to hear if this
results in problems or if it actually does help.
NOTE! READ THIS AND PONDER:
pl5 now checks against writing to the text segment. Older binaries
which used the original estdio library (used with the earliest gcc
versions) are liable to break: not that there should be many of these
binaries around. So if you get "Segmentation fault (core dumped)" on
binaries you know used to work, this is the likely cause.
One problem spot that I've seen even with new binaries is due to a
library bug in 'sigaction()'. If the second argument is NULL (ie the
pointer to the new sigaction structure), sigaction() will incorrectly
dereference it resulting in a core-dump. The only program so far that
I've seen doing this is 'dd', but there may be others.
On my system I have found a whopping total of two binaries which didn't
like the text segment protection, so it shouldn't really be a major
problem for anybody. Famous last words.
Linus
PS. The strace code in pl4 was incorrectly credited in the announcement.
The code was written by Branko Lankester, not Ross Biro (who did the
tcp/ip changes).
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:06 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.98.4 (November 9, 1992)
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 Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:06 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.98.3 (October 27, 1992)
More networking updates.. Ross Biro is still struggling with net-1.
Michael Johnson (now RH kernel release manager) works on line printer
driver.
Locking function cleanups (for inodes, superblocks, buffer heads). We
also now pass in the superblock pointer instead of the device number to
the filesystem routines. That cleans up use and locking of
"get_super()" a lot.
[Original announcement below]
Ok, I already sent out an announcement last night, but due to the time
(6AM over here) I wasn't really in a mood to write a real annoucement.
Here it is.
linux-0.98.3 is available by anonymous ftp at least on nic.funet.fi:
pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus, both as context diffs against 0.98.2 and the
pre-version of 0.98.3 and as complete source. The complete source
package was done by directly applying the diffs - this means that the
Makefile dependancies are probably not 100% up-to-date as I remove those
from the diffs. It shouldn't be any problem, and you can always do a
"make dep ; make clean" before actually compiling the kernel.
0.98 pl3 fixes several bugs, and should remove all known NULL-pointer
problems that made 0.98.2 unusable for most people. In addition to the
NULL pointer fixes, the following things have changed:
- removed most of the cli-sti pairs in the filesystem code by rewriting
the locking routines to use a different algorithm, possible due to
the rewritten wait-queue code that I did back in 0.96c or so.
Interrupt latency should be better on slow machines, but I don't know
if it's noticeable.
- Minor 387-emulation fixes by Bill Metzenthen - only noticeable under
special conditions.
- Corrected various error-returns in the fs (thanks to Bruce Evans for
running some error diagnostics). Error messages when opening (and
renaming etc) files that had a non-directory in the path were wrong,
and should be ok now (ie giving ENOTDIR instead of EACCESS or ENOENT).
Some other problems reported by Bruce fixed.
- Changed the interface for some fs-related functions due to cleaning
up super-block handling. Most noticeably, iget() and related
functions no longer specify the inode with a device and inode number,
but instead with a super-block pointer and inode number. This is
more logical, and should make unnamed devices (ie internal
filesystems like nfs and /proc) cleaner. Also note that the calling
sequence for sb->s_op->put_inode() also has changed since 0.98. This
is of interest only if you are writing filesystem drivers..
- ASK_SVGA was broken in 0.98.2 - it should be ok now.
Also, various minor fixes as usual. No new features, but I hope 0.98.3
will be a lot less bug-prone due to the changes since 0.98.1. Some
minor tcp/ip corrections (but most of them were in the pre-release), and
I removed a race-condition in the tty-handling code.
Note that people who use math without a co-processor should certainly
upgrade to 0.98.3: the new emulator is much better than my original one
both in speed and accuracy/exception handling. x11perf is very much
bearable now even without a 387, and things like ray-tracing etc
shouldn't be a problem any more. It's slower than hardware fp, of
course, but at least it works.
The new emulator also means there is no reason for a separate soft-float
library, so I'd assume that will be gone in the next gcc release for
linux.
As usual, a new kernel version probably means you'll have to recompile
'ps' and friends. But at least the same 'ps' sources that worked for
0.97.6 should still work.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:06 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.98.2 (October 18, 1992)
Start virtualizing real mmap() functionlity in the kernel. The first
signs of me thinking about this already showed up as some unused header
files earlier, this fleshes things out some more. No actual filesystem
code yet..
This also removes my old simple math emulator, and introduces the new
and much improved one from Bill Metzenthen.
Bill originally wrote it for the djgpp suite (DJ Delories gcc port to
DOS extenders). It was much more accurate and well designed than my
hackish one, and I was happy to throw my old code away. The new math
emulator also did things that I had never bothered with, notably the
more complex i387 functions (exponentials and trig).
I also fixed the static maximum memory limit: we now generate the kernel
page tables dynamically rather than having a 16M or 32M static limit.
SCSI updates: removable media support (which also implies re-reading the
partition table etc)
[Original announcement below]
patch-2 is >150kB compressed, as it contains several big changes. Most
notable are:
- the new FPU-emulator by Bill Metzenthen. It's bigger than the old
one, but thanks to it, linux fpu emulation is no longer a quick hack,
but a real emulator: it does all the 387(486) math instructions, and
does them much faster than the old emulator + the soft library.
The new math-emulator means that a separate soft-float library is no
longer needed. It also makes even a non-coprocessor system pretty
useful for limited math-calcs - the complex functions are much faster
when they no longer have to be calculated using simple functions, and
even the simpler instructions that my old emulator handled are faster
using the new one.
The size of the new emulator may mean that people who have little
RAM, but do have a coprocessor should probably recompile the kernel
with the emulator disabled.
- various minor mm fixes by me: trapping kernel NULL dereferences,
cleaning up the page table initializations and the 16MB patches, and
various other bugfixes. get_free_page(GFP_ATOMIC) should preserve
the interrupt flag, so malloc() should be safe now - hopefully no
more of the tcp/ip memory management problems.
The NULL pointer trapping may result in errors like:
Unable to handle kernel paging request at address C0000???
Oops: 0000
..... debugging info .....
There were several NULL pointer dereferences in the serial and tty
drivers, which should now be fixed. I've also fixed any other errors
I've seen, but if there are problems in the scsi drivers or similar
things I cannot test, I'd like to hear about them.
- scsi driver changes by Eric Youngdale. Preliminary support for
removable media, and some bug-fixes. Due to white-space problems
with eric's patches, the scsi patches are a bit bigger than
necessary, but they should be ok even though I had to put them in
partly by hand (and being unable to test them...)
- The new tcp/ip patches that were sent to the NET channel not long
ago. Yes, they are alpha, but so is the whole tcp/ip directory, so I
put them in even thought they haven't been extensively tested (and
they did have a serious problem in the ioctl code, which I fixed).
- psaux mouse patches by Dean Troyer, as well as the mouse.wait = NULL
patch.
Before (or after) patching, you should remove the old math-emulator (ie
"rm -rf /usr/src/linux/kernel/math") as it is no longer needed. You
should also do a "make dep" to update dependencies: as usual, I edited
out the dependancy-changes. Do a "make clean", edit the main (and net)
Makefiles to suit your system, and compile.
And finally: I will no longer be making the bootdisks available -
they'll be made by hlu/jwinstead and will probably be boot+root-disks
using lilo, as done on the hlu disks. That may mean that a bootimage
won't be available at once, but most people who want to use the
absolutely newest images probably compile them themselves anyway, so
that shouldn't be a problem.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:05 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.98.1 (October 5, 1992)
Add ATI XL busmouse driver by Bob Harris, split off MS busmouse driver into
a driver of its own (rather than a subdriver of the Logitech mouse driver)
FAT uid/gid/umask mount options.
SCSI driver updates.
[Original announcement below]
Patch1 to 0.98 mainly corrects some driver problems: it contains the
added "inb_p(HD_STATUS)" for hd.c, as well as a changed mouse driver
setup (hope it works - I couldn't test it..). There are also some SCSI
driver patches: the seagate driver uses irqaction() to get irq's, and
the aha1542 driver has the speedup patches.
The bootimage should be compiled without the auto-SVGA mode, so people
who had problems with linux automatically using a SVGA mode should be ok
in this release.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:05 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.98 (September 29, 1992)
Real networking (TCP) merged! This is the now-called "net-1" code by
Ross Biro. Boy, was it ugly, but it made for a big jump from not having
any at all.
(And add support for up the 32MB of memory ;)
[Original announcement below]
Sorry for being late - I can't even show any great new features in 0.98,
but at least it's out now, and available at the normal place (ie at
nic.funet.fi, pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus). So far there is only a
full-source version available, although I'll probably make it available
as a patch too tomorrow or so (but the patch won't contain the tcp/ip
stuff).
0.98 is essentially the same as 0.97.pl6 - the changes are mostly:
- tcp/ip (0.8.1) is in. It's not compiled into the standard bootimage,
and you'd better be on the tcpip mailing-list to use it, but it's
there. I've been unable to test it further than just watch it
compile...
- extfs patch to correct the problem with big directories with holes.
- mouse patches (ie improved detection-routines)
- minor scsi patches (ultrastor driver change)
- swiss keyboard
- some serial driver patches
- the 32mb patches are in, so if you aren't using a DMA-SCSI driver,
and have more than 16MB physical memory, you can get it recognized.
- edited hd.c
- corrected core-dumping routines
I didn't get my mm patches working yet, so they'll have to wait. The
above are almost 100% by others - I have edited some of the patches, but
there is nothing major new by me. Most of it is minor bug-fixes, and
the only thing that might be a bit of a problem are the hd.c changes:
but I hope they'll solve more problems than they cause. Knock wood.
At nic.funet.fi you can currently find (a) the full sources (b) a
bootimage (US keyboard, floppy root, no tcp/ip) and (c) the protocols.h
file needed for compiling the tcp/ip directory (which should go into
/usr/include/netinet/). I hope people try it out, and that there are no
new problems with this release.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:05 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.97.6 (September 20, 1992)
Ted Ts'o did extensive serial driver changes, and fixed up some of the
tty layer to match. Tty's now allocated dynamically.
[Original announcement below]
This patch does not contain any major bug-fixes: it corrects named pipes
that broke with pl5, and has some minor changes in the IO-instructions
and the hd-driver, but those shouldn't matter for most of you.
It does contain all the scsi-patches that I've gotten so far, so if the
bootup sequence died on you in the scsi code, pl6 should correct this.
The major part of the patch is tytso's serial line changes, making the
tty structures dynamic. No more NR_PTY's - the number of pty's is now
bounded only by the minor number setup (max 64 pty's) or the amount of
memory available (opening a pty requires a page of memory for tty
queues). Similarly for serial lines.
The above just means that while pl6 can be useful, the changes to pl5
aren't big enough to worry about. Most people don't use named pipes, it
seems, and the other changes are either cosmetic or hardware-dependent.
I still hope people upgrade, if only so that I can get new bug-reports.
I had hoped to release 0.98 this weekend, but studies and the scsi/hd
problems put an end to that. 0.98 should be out next weekend or so.
Expect the tcp/ip subdirectory and possibly some mm changes.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:05 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.97.5 (September 12, 1992)
SCSI CD-ROM support by David Giller (based on sd.c by Drew)
Microsoft Busmouse support by Teemu Rantanen
Do the same buffer cleanups to extfs that we just did to Minixfs.
Efficient VGA emulation in dosemu wanted to know when we write
to the pseudo-VGA memory area. Add vm86 mode hooks for that.
[Original announcement below]
Patch 5 fixes the extended filesystem problems (thanks to Remy Card), as
well as including many smaller fixes (some more fs cleanups, the CDROM
patches and several other minor changes). Pl5 finally removes even the
last few header-files that were incompatible with the normal headers, so
the "-nostdinc -I$(KERNELHDRS)" stuff is gone.
Patch 5 should also fix the problems with iopl() that resulted in the
X8514-server having problems with 0.97.pl2 and above.
In case people are wondering, my schedule for 1.0 looks something like
this:
- 0.98 out in about a week: this is essentially 0.97.5 + the tcp/ip
directory, as well as any fixes that may come up. I'll try to get
the loadable driver interface into it too.
- 0.99 out after 0.98 has been shaken down: a month or so.
- 1.0 will be the same as 0.99: the only changes will be eventual
trivial bug-fixes in case 0.99 has some problems. This is just to
try to get over the "X.0" bug syndrome.
There are a few on-going projects: depending on circumstances these will
be implemented sooner or later, so I won't give any promises. These
include: loadable drivers/fs's (alpha-patches already availabla), full
support for different block-sizes (some work still required), and a
extensive rewrite of the mm routines (I'll want to make a vmm interface
similar to the vfs interface for the filesystem routines).
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:04 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.97.4 (September 7, 1992)
Linus "dances with patches" Torvalds strikes again: I've already made
patchlevel 4 of 0.97. It may not be a new record, but it's close :-)
Patch 4 is a very minor patch, but it's pretty important if you want a
stable filesystem (and let's face it: most people seem to prefer a
filesystem that stays up a bit longer). While patch3 corrected most of
the race-conditions in the minix fs, I overlooked the [f]truncate system
calls, and this new patch corrects that.
[f]truncate is a very race-prone function, and as if that wasn't enough,
there was also a pretty bad error in truncate.c that resulted in the
indirect blocks not being correctly marked dirty when doing partial
truncates. The latter problem is probably the reason for most of the
filesystem corruptions that have been reported - the race-conditions
were a lot harder to fix, but they also happen a lot less often.
Note that the [f]truncate bug isn't new: it has been in the kernel since
[f]truncate was first implemented (0.95?). But until now, [f]truncate()
hasn't actually been used very much - only the latest versions of the
binutils have used ftruncate to strip binaries etc. So the problem
hasn't shown up that much.
So while I consider patch4 to be crucial, you /can/ actually live
without it: I haven't seen the buffer corruption problem at all (until I
actually tested for it after getting good bug-reports), so you can
provably miss it for a long time. But if you have ever had corruption
problems, I'd suggest upgrading to pl4 as soon as possible.
The corruption problems show up most clearly when using a new "strip"
binary, although they are theoretically possible with other programs
too. Thanks to "obz@raster.kodak.com" and "jon@robots.ox.ac.uk" for
good bug-reports: thanks to them I was able to pin down the error to
truncate.c, and after that it was pretty easy to get rid of it.
Also note that this patch still hasn't fixed the extended filesystem: I
suspect the same bugs lurk around there. I'll get it corrected by 0.98
at the latest.
The patch is included at the end of this post (it's very minor - it
contains patches mainly against linux/fs/minix/truncate.c) , and I'll
also update nic.funet.fi (pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus) to have the new
sources. Sorry for the inconvenience,
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:04 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.97.3 (September 5, 1992)
Hey, we switched to the GPL several months ago, but only now do we
include the license text itself. Apparently everybody expected
everybody else to just know what the GPL was..
Add a README on compiling the kernel (by Lasu)
Add PS/2 mouse driver, make generic "mouse" infrastructure.
Add /proc filesystem, clean up minixfs block mapping.
sys_wait4() and swapoff().
VM gets a "secondary page free" list for things like interrupts
that want a page _now_ and can't wait for the regular free list
to fill up.
[Original announcement below]
Patch3 is almost 100kB even compressed, as there were quite big changes
in the mm and minix fs. No major new features: there are two new system
calls: swapoff(const char * swapfile) and wait4(), and linux accepts
several swap-files, but the rest of the thing is mostly bug-fixes or
simply rewrites.
Major changes:
- new swap-page handling: linux no longer uses just one bit to keep
track of used swap-space, but a counter for each swap-page. This
allows processes to share swap-pages after a fork(), and should
result in /major/ performance increases on machines with less memory.
I've seen better performance even with 8MB - I wouldn't be surprised
if 4MB machines would re-compile the kernel noticeably faster under
pl3. I'd be interested to hear numbers.
- The low 1MB memory that isn't used directly by the kernel is now
swappable memory, instead of being hardcoded for buffer cache. The
patches for this were originally by tytso, and I expanded on it a bit
more. This might also help better performance on 2-4MB machines.
Note that this does /not/ mean that you can use 1M machines for
linux: linux still needs some extended memory.
- the dosfs has been upgraded to dosfs.8 - patches by almesber.
- I edited the minix fs pretty heavily to remove a couple of race-
conditions. The same races still exist in the extended fs, as I
didn't have time to edit that yet. The minix-fs took precedence as I
know that better, and extfs isn't "official" yet anyway.
other changes:
- the mouse-driver now handles both Logitech (minor = 0) and PS/2
(minor = 1) busmice.
- there is a proc-fs for access to user memory/files etc.
- better support for the tcp/ip patches (but see below...)
- corrected symlink and /dev/[k]mem behaviour
- Lars Wirzenius' README (with minimal comments by me) and the GNU
COPYING notice are now part of the normal kernel setup, and can be
found in the tar-archive.
- the floppy ioctl() to get the FD parameters no longer requires root
priviledges. Thus, the msdos emulator runs even for a normal user.
Some comments on patchlevel 3:
mm:
The swap-page handling resulted in a reduction of swap-file (or
partition) size to a maximum of 16MB per file. It's nothing inherent to
the code, but it eased some algorithms, so I didn't bother coding around
it. After all, 16MB is enough for most people, and if you want more,
you can have up to 128 swapfiles of 16MB each. If I get enough
hate-mail about it, I might just try to find the energy to correct it.
Maybe.
Bigger swapfiles will still work, but linux will take advantage of only
the low 16MB. Also, there is no nifty logic to try to optimize the
usage of the swap-files: pages are simply allocated from one swap-file
until it fills up, and then the next swap-file is used.
The memory management changes break ps/free once more, but not very
much. Also, I changed the load-average counting, so 'w' also needs
slight editing. On the other hand, I made '/dev/kmem' mmap()able, and
'ps' and 'free' should be edited to take advantage of that: it should
result in much faster operation, as well as possibly using less real
memory.
fs:
The fs changes should remove at least two races - the races don't happen
very often, but they were theoretically possible, and might be the
reason for some fs corruption problems that have been reported. The
changes are related to the use of bmap() - the bmap interface doesn't
really lend itself to some things that it was used for. Re-writing
internal fs-functions not to use bmap not only should have removed any
races, but also actually resulted in cleaner code.
The proc-fs code isn't too beautiful, and I'll probably leave it out
from 0.98 unless I can make it loadable. We'll see. If anybody wants
to use it, you can do something like
# mount -t proc /dev/ram /proc
Instead of /dev/ram you can use any block device - it's not used, and is
only a dummy as the proc-fs doesn't actually use any external device.
(but note that the device is still marked as mounted, so you cannot
mount it for anything else).
kernel/mm/lib:
The TCP/IP patches are also essentially in 0.97.pl3 - not the full
TCP/IP directory, only the patches to the main kernel. NOTE!! I don't
like the 'grab_malloc_pages()' function, so I left that out, and added a
GFP_ATOMIC priority to get_free_page() that should be used instead. I
hope this will be used (Ross?), as it's a lot cleaner.
Also, I hope the tcp/ip people will clean up malloc() so that it doesn't
panic instead of returning NULL etc. Ugly, ugly. This is related to
the get_free_page(GFP_ATOMIC) changes, and I'd like to have patches as
soon as possible - tcp/ip won't be part of the standard kernel until
that can be cleaned up.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:04 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.97.2 (August 23, 1992)
We're making ready for big processes, and vm86 mode!
- Move the kernel to virtual address 0xc0000000 instead of zero.
- Allocate per-process page tables
We can now have 3GB processes, and more than 64 of them!
[Original announcement below]
As promised, 0.97.pl2 is out today (well, over here it's already
tomorrow, so I guess I'm 35 minutes late. Naughty, naughty). Right
now, the patch (and full source for those that don't like to patch up
the system) is available at "nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus",
but I'll try to put it on some other sites as well if I'm able and
energetic enough. Probably tomorrow - together with a binary for those
that aren't willing to comple the kernel on their own.
0.97.2 has mostly my mm/fs patches, along with some relatively minor
diffs by others (including file locking by Doug Evans). User-level
changes are minor: but the mm has changed a lot, and the vfs routines
have been changed to keep track of the error-messages a bit better.
Also, the vfs-interface to "follow_link()" changed slightly: people who
are making filesystems should look at the changes (but they are
relatively minor, and shouldn't result in any problems - both the
extended fs and minix fs needed just a simple change in their respective
symlink.c files).
The mm changes /might/ lower performance slightly, as the paging TLB's
are now flushed at every task-switch due to the new system, but I doubt
it's noticeable. The other performance changes (dynamic buffers etc) in
0.97(.pl1) should overshadow that particular problem.
I hope this release means that these kinds of low-level rewrites aren't
needed for a while: the last couple of releases have changed some very
fundamental things. Nothing seems to have suffered too badly, but I'd
be happier if it all got tested more thoroughly. Anyway, discounting
the ps/free etc suite of programs, everything I have tried has worked
flawlessly despite the big kernel changes.
I'm still worried about the reports about messed-up buffers, but have
been unable to reproduce the problem, and nobody has so far
disillusioned me about my guess that it's a problem with the SCSI code
(which at least gives me an excuse for not doing anything about it :-).
Other problems include at least one report of spontaneous re-booting,
which is totally inexplicable, so I'm blaming hardware once more until I
can get better data on the thing.
As to patches sent by others: 0.97.2 contains very little of that kind
of code. I've been too busy either working, or implementing my own
changes that I have simply ignored them for the most part. Remind me
(or resend them relative to the new kernel) if you have a patch that is
still needed.
There is one new system call: 'vm86(struct vm86_struct * info)'. It's
not ready for general use yet - it works, but will probably need some
tweaking before being practical. But supporting a virtual 86 mode was
so easy after the mm rewrite that I felt it was worth implementing: the
vm86 code is less than 50 lines of C right now.
Linus
PS. The bright spot of the week goes to "The Oxford Beer Trolls" - all
UK inhabitants should probably be locked into some (big) mental
institution and TOBT should probably have a wing of their own, but
thanks to them linux can now call itself "beerware" :-)
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:04 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.97.1 (August 6, 1992)
Make the page allocator use a free page list instead of a silly
linear search.
Add sys_vhangup() and stubs for send/rcv/sendto/recvfrom/shutdown.
We're making ready for real networking..
Remove nonworking extfs bitmap allocators. We'll have them in ext2.
[Original announcement below]
Patch 1 is essentially a performance-release, but it also contains some
other patches: Ross Biro's tcp-ip stubs are there (but not the tcpip
subdirectory: alpha-testers should know where to find that), as are the
ext-fs superblock cleanups. The first header-file patch by hlu is also
in there.
The resulting patch is pretty big - it's also not as cleaned up as I'd
like it to be. The swapping/buffer-block handling heuristics are
better, but could still do with some tuning. Also, the idle task in
this version doesn't do very much: it will be expanded to do some more
page-table calculations.
I will be unable to hack on linux for a couple of weeks (I'll still
answer mails, read the newsgroup and fix bugs, but no heavy-duty
hacking) due to some "circumstances beyond my control". That probably
means that this patch is the last one for a while (three weeks) unless
some bad bugs show up.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:03 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.97 (August 1, 1992)
Move <xxx.h> to <linux/xxxx.h>
Variable-sized buffer blocks and dynamic buffer cache allocation. The VM
knows how to shrink it automatically!
Add support for "fast" interrupt handlers for serial lines.
Update copyrights to say 1992 too.
Remove broken VESA video card handling.
Separate out partition handling code ("genhd").
Make init unkillable.
Norwegian keyboard map.
Future Domain SCSI controller driver by Rik Faith.
Changes in 0.97:
- The VESA-support was removed. I'd be happy to put it back once it
works on all hardware. Instead of the VESA-code, I finally put in
the automatic SVGA setup patches. See the top-level Makefile.
- The IRQ code has solidified, and should work on all machines. Not
all of the SCSI drivers use it yet, so I expect patches for that..
- Serial interrupts are handled slightly differently, and performance
should be up. I've sent out a few alpha-releases, and testing seems
to indicate that's actually true this time. Reactions have ranged
from "nice" to "wonderful" :-)
- The buffer-cache and memory management code has been edited quite a
bit. ps/free etc programs that reads kernel memory directly no
longer work, and even a recompilation won't be enough. They actually
need editing before they work.
The buffer-cache now grows and shrinks dynamically depending on how
much free memory there is. Shift+PrintScreen will give some memory
statistics. (Ctrl+PrSc gives task-info, ALT+PrSc gives current
register values).
The mm code changes removed some race-conditions in the VM code, and
I also tried to make the Out-of-swapspace error less severe (better
thrashing-detection etc).
- The super-block code has been cleaned up. Especially the extended fs
needs to be edited a bit to take advantage of the new setup, and I
expect Remy Card will have a patch out eventually.
- include-files have been moved around some more: there are still some
names that clash with the standard headers, but not many.
- Unswappable processes implemented: by default only 'init' is
unswappable. This is a bit safer in low-memory conditions, as at
least init won't die due to low memory. I also made killing init
impossible: if init doesn't recognize a signal, it simply won't get
it. Some other changes ("while (1) fork();" won't kill the machine
for non-root users etc)
- The new SCSI drivers are in. These make the kernel noticeably
bigger, but you can leave them out if you don't want them.
- The floppy- and hd-drivers print out more debugging-info in case of
errors: this might be irritating if you have hardware that works, but
often gives soft-errors. On the other hand, some old debugging-info
was removed - notably for user-level protection errors etc.
- Various minor fixes. I haven't made cdiffs (and I haven't gotten any
requests for them, so I probably never will), but they would be
pretty big.
Things that I didn't have time for:
- I wanted to rewrite the tty drivers to be more "streams-like" (ie not
an actual streams-implementation, but some of the ideas from
streams). I never got around to it: there was simply too much else
to do.
- I got a lot of patches, and some went in, others didn't. If you
think your patch was important, please re-send it relative to the new
version.
I'd like comments on the new system: performance / clarity of code etc.
0.97 should correct all known bugs (at least the ones I know about), but
I guess that's just wishful thinking.
Note that the dynamic buffer-code also handles differently-sized
buffers, but that the rest of the system (block device drivers,
filesystem code etc) cannot yet take advantage of this - there is still
some coding needed.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:03 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.96-pre (April 21, 1992)
More VFS layer work: remove more special cases, and take advantage of
the virtual VFS functions (close and select). Add fchown/fchgrp and
[f]truncate.
Orest Zborowski shows up, and works on porting X11 to X. This needs a
lot of infrastructure support: ioperm() for user-mode IO port access,
and SVR style virtual terminal ioctl's to make porting easier. Perhaps
more importantly, the mmap() system call shows up, even if it right now
is limited only to a direct /dev/mem remapping.
[Original changelog below]
- truncate/ftruncate/fchmod/fchown system calls
note that there aren't any library functions for these, so they
aren't very useful yet...
[f]truncate needed a change in the logic of the internal
truncate VFS call - anybody that has any nonstandard filesystem
probably needs to look it up.
- io-bitmap syscalls giving root-processes access to selected io ports
from user space. There is a "ioperm()" system call that lets the
process select which ports it wants to enable/disable (all ports
disabled as default) as well as a (standard sysv?) ioctl interface
that X uses.
again, no library stubs, but it allows things like reading and
setting the cmos clock without using /dev/port, as well as
control over the VGA registers...
- mmap for /dev/mem
more things needed for X...
- the signal-handling fixes needed for gdb
These aren't yet complete: serial lines still send signals under
interrupts that can result in problems (ie ptrace doesn't
correctly get them), but that's pretty unlikely (and will be
fixed in the final 0.96). Breakpoints should work etc..
- multiple shared libraries
Up to 6 simultaneous shared libraries/process: the patches were
originally by pmacdona, but they were heavily changed by me, and
I think they work in a more natural manner now. One user-level
change is that the libraries are now checked for read and
execute permissions for safety-reasons.
- cleaned up special files.
read/write/ioctl no longer has special-case code: it is all
handled with tables to functions. This will mean that the SCSI
patches won't patch in quite cleanly into 0.96: you'll need to
add the code that sets up the functions.
Again: device drivers and vfs-filesystem hackers need to look
into the changes, although they are pretty logical (earlier
versions just didn't implement all the vfs-routines)
Note that the vfs-code for select is still not used: select is
hardcoded for the devices it supports right now.
- ptrace() has a new interface
as gdb for versions < 0.95c don't work on the new version, and
gdb won't work very well at all on 0.95c[+], there was no reason
not to break ptrace. Thus 0.96 has a new calling convention for
ptrace, and the old ptrace library function no longer works.
I'm including the new ptrace library function at the end of this
post.
- mount() takes 4 arguments, and checks that only the super-user can
mount/umount things.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:02 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
0.96c second patch
The subject pretty much says it all: I've sent out the "weekly patch"
and I'd be very interested in comments. As with patch1, there are some
very fundamental changes in the kernel, and they might have some
problems. I'd want as many as possible to test out linux-0.96c.pl2, as
that has always been the best way to test out the changes. Everything
works on my machine, but that doesn't guarantee it will work on other
setups...
The MAJOR change in 0.96c.pl2 is the totally rewritten sleep/wakeup
code. That, together with the IRQ code introduced in pl1 and slightly
edited in pl2, means that two very fundamental things in the linux
kernel have changed in the last two weeks. The code is cleaner, easier
to add devices to, and hopefully faster, but it's still a bit risky to
change this kind of very low-level behaviour.
Select() is now implemented using the vfs jump tables, and thanks to the
better sleep/wakup interface, select() performance should be noticeably
better. At least xload seems to give lower load-averages, and I hope
ka9q will work better with the new kernel. Note that things like the
tty code doesn't yet take full advantage of the new features the
rewritten sleep offers, but I wanted to get a good testing-release out
before actually tweaking all the routines to use the new interface.
The IRQ routines have changed slightly, and all known bugs are fixed.
While I'm most interested to hear comments about the IRQ and
select/sleep/wakup code, there are a few other changes in pl2:
- Swiss keyboard support.
- Screen blanking now only reacts to key-presses and kernel messages:
normal tty output doesn't make the screen unblank.
- DOS-fs version 5 is in. It wouldn't hurt to try it out. It's
somewhat alpha still, but it seems to work. mtools should be a thing of
the past once the dosfs is a bit more tested.
- core-file magic number, and a minor bug in ptrace is fixed
- a bus-mouse is supported. I'd like to hear if it still works after I
did the select() patches "blind" (I can't test it on my machine).
- iopl changing is possible (but requires root priviledges): this
allows access to all IO ports, as well as the interrupt flag. Don't use
it unless /absolutely/ necessary: a bug in your program will most likely
crash the machine if you are running with IO priviledges. It's needed
for some X VGA drivers.
As a result of all the changes, the diff is pretty big. Apply and build
it with something like:
cd /usr/src
zcat linux-0.96c.patch2.Z | patch -p0
cd linux
make dep
make clean
make Image
assuming you have the 0.96c.pl1 kernel in /usr/src/linux. I've had some
reports that my patches won't always go in cleanly: I know for a fact
that patch1 patches cleanly (I rebuilt 0.96c.pl1 by downloading it all
from banjo), so the error is in your end.
Possible problems:
- The VESA code in setup.S has some problems. I haven't even looked
into it yet, so if it won't work for you, please either (a) use the
unpatched setup.S from 0.96c, or (b) try to find the problem and tell
me. (b) is preferable, of course. I'd like to have VESA support, but
if the bug isn't found, I'll have to use the non-VESA version for 0.97.
- The IRQ code in 0.96c.pl1 could overrun the stack if linux got
un-ending interrupt requests, resulting in a re-boot. With pl2, this
shouldn't happen: linux should print out something like "Recursive
interrupt on IRQx. Shutting down" and simply disable the problematic
IRQ line. If you see this message, I'd be very interested to hear about
it (which IRQ, what devices you have, etc).
- And any new or old bugs I haven't found yet.
I have one report that 0.96c.pl1 has problems with the inode table, and
panics on bootup with a "no more inodes in mem" report. Can anybody
confirm this sighting? I haven't found the reason for it, and haven't
seen it myself. I'm hoping it's an installation problem, but if anybody
else sees the same behaviour, I'm SOL.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:02 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
linux-0.96c.patch1 contains more changes than I originally envisioned: I
changed the IRQ routines and the serial code to be easier and cleaner
(and hopefully more efficient) and I thought that would be it. I was
wrong.
I got several patches (and one bug-report) again, and while I haven't
had time to check them all, some of them are in. Fixes:
- Remy Cards correction to the out-of-space problem with the extended
fs is here. Most people using the ext-fs might already have applied
this patch, in which case you might have problems patching.
- my ftruncate() fix is here. Again, if you already did the trivial
patch by hand, you'll get errors when patching.
- almesber's implementation of read-only filesystems is here (after
editing by yours truly). The mount() system call now accepts a flags
integer as well as a pointer to some arbitraty data in user space for
some special mount() calls. The general flags allow (a) read-only
mounting, (b) disabling of suid executables (c) disabling of device
special files and (d) total disabling of executables on a per-filesystem
basis. The filesystem specific mount() info isn't currently used by any
fs, but can be used to specify additional information that depends on a
special fs type (a password or similar would be possible..)
- the rename() system call had a bug in that it allowed moving over a
directory: I think the code to handle this was lost in the vfs editing,
and although the GNU mv utility checked it, a malicious (or just
unsuspecting) program can destroy the fs using this. Thanks for the
bug-report: it was very easy to add once I saw the problem.
- support for vesa-standard svga cards in setup.S. I'm unable to test
this, but my svga card still works after the patch, so I left it in in
the hope that it doesn't break for anybody else.
- various minor editing by me, or minor patches sent in by others.
The full cdiff is almost 50kB compressed, so this is a bigger-than-usual
patch. Hope there are no problems. People who are using the new SCSI
drivers might have problems with my changes to the SCSI irq-setup
changes, so be careful (actually using the original sources might be a
good idea, and then upgrading again). I hope to get the new SCSI
drivers into the kernel soon (definitely in time for 0.98).
I'd be interested to hear comments on serial line performance, bugs,
features, etc. As usual, I'm hoping this release won't contain any new
bugs while fixing all the old ones, but I guess that's likely to happen
right after the first winter olympics in Hell.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:02 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.96c (July 4, 1992)
Ext filesystem support! The VFS layer switchover was successful.
Ext support is a more FFS-like filesystem, although still quite heavily
influenced by my original Minix filesystem. But it allows much bigger
filesystems (minixfs was limited to 64MB) and many more files (minixfs
had a 16-bit inode number).
Named pipes by Paul Hargrove (using the regular pipe code for actual IO).
[original announcement below]
0.96c is actually what I called patch3 earlier this week, but as the new
features were pretty big and the cdiff's are probably going to be bigger
than the normal patches, I decided I might as well make it a totally new
minor release and make a bootimage and complete source available.
0.96c contains:
- bugfixes (tty, console driver, pty's, sockets)
- fifo's (names pipes - Paul Hargrove & editing by me)
- the alpha extended filesystem (Remy Card)
- st_blocks implemented (ie du, ls give reasonable if not exact values
for disk-space used)
- Makefile cleanups and warnings at compile-time removed
Note that while the extended filesystem code is there, and this kernel
successfully mounts and uses the new filesystem (with long filenames and
>64MB partitions), it's still under testing: I haven't made the mkefs
program available, and the extended filesystem features shouldn't be
used for other than testing right now.
Some of the changes are just cleanups: most of the warnings when
compiling the new kernel should be gone (not counting the scsi code
which is still the old non-cleaned-up version), and the make'ing of the
kernel is more logical now.
The bugfixes include the corrected console.c driver, the socket
corrections (without which X sometimes locks up), some pty semantics
corrections (although I'm still not certain it's correct) and some
editing in the general tty driver (including fixing the bug introduced
in 0.96b.pl2 that caused a reboot with uninitialized tty devices).
While the extended filesystem support isn't "official" yet, I can
happily report that my limited testing hasn't found any problems with
long filenames etc. It still needs a fsck program, but 1.0 looks like a
real possibility soon.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:02 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
As promised, here is the second patch for 0.96b which hopefully clears
up the problems with some mice by implementing most of the serial line
flags like 5-8 bit characters and parity. It mainly corrects only
serial problems, but there are a couple of other patches in it too: the
fsqrt emulation patch is here, so if you already did it, you'll get a
bad patch for that file (which you can ignore). This patch also changes
all instances of signal-setting to use the "send_sig()" subroutine which
should allow gdb to debug all signals.
Apart from the serial lines, I also cleaned up the general tty-handling
routines slightly and removed at least one race-condition in the tty
code. I don't know if it's noticeable, though.
You'll need patch1 (available from all the normal sites) in order to
apply this one. As usual, I'd like to hear if this patch does help
people, or if there are new problems. This patch will also be available
on the normal ftp sites, but as it was pretty minor, I decided I might
as well include it in the post (uuencoded and compressed).
(I also corrected the all-time favourite bug: linux now reports the
right version number once more..)
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:01 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
Re: Too much uneaten serial causes system hang?
In article <arumble.709312764@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU> arumble@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU
(Anthony Rumble) writes:
>
>YES! I have noticed this VERY exact thing also!
Oh, well: it's a bug in the serial drivers that I have already fixed,
but I haven't done the c-diffs yet. I have rewritten big parts of the
serial line code to be more easily configured for different IRQ numbers,
and I noticed the bug while doing that. I'll make patch1 for 0.96b
available later today or tomorrow.
patch1 will be mostly just the serial driver code: it allows changing
the irq's (and port addresses) of serial devices on the fly (with an
ioctl call), so people that have ser4 on irq5 etc shouldn't have to
recompile the kernel. It also returns EBUSY if you try to open a serial
line that shares the irq-line with another line etc.
Another change in patch1 will the the handling of ctrl-alt-del: it will
send a SIGINT to the init process if the reset-function is disabled.
This makes it ideal for a controlled shutdown, but it does need a
/bin/init that knows about this.
Linus
PS. It seems both the DOS-fs and the extended fs will be out for
alpha-testing next week, so I assume 0.97 will have them both if things
work out ok.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:01 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.96b (June 21, 1992)
First cut at core-dumping. Also, do more dynamic boottime memory
allocation, rather than allocating data structures statically.
Allocate task structures at run-time rather than having a big array of
them.
First "obsolete" system call. The old "stat()" system call was too
limited, due to "struct stat" having various 16-bit fields etc (notably
inode numbers). We make a new stat() function, and keep the old one
around as "old_stat()" for binary compatibility.
We also need a bigger "utsname" to hold real node names.
Whoo! NR_OPEN is now 32 rather than 20.
itimer() support driven by X11 adoption (Darren Senn).
gcc starts using fsqrt, so that gets added to the FP emulation. We're
still basing that on my trivial code.
[Original changelog below]
0.96b is not a new major release: it's pretty close to 0.96a with all my
patches (1-4). However, as there has been 4 patches already, I decided
it would be time for a full kernel release along with a bootimage, so
that people who don't feel confident with patching can use the new
features.
If you already have 0.96a patchlevel 4, 0.96b will offer you these new
features:
- the math-emulation now handles fsqrt, as gcc-2.2.2 generates that
inline. I haven't tested the kernel code at all: I tested the
algorithm in user space, but I'm lazy, so I never turned off my 387
to do real testing. I hope it works.
- better vt100 terminal emulation thanks to Mika Liljeberg.
- I removed a possible race-condition in the buffer-cache code.
- minor fixes
The vt100 emulation should now be complete enough for almost everything
(including vt100 test suites): as a result the setterm utility had to be
changed (as the old setterm codes aren't compatible with the full vt100
codes). setterm-0.96b.tar.Z contains the new setterm.
The soon-to-be-released gcc-2.2.2 will need the 0.96b kernel: (a) due to
the fsqrt emulation and (b) it uses the new stat() system call. So
upgrading is a good idea. (If you have a co-processor, (a) isn't used,
but (b) still stands)
If you have an unpatched 0.96a, the differences to 0.96b are roughly
(not counting the above-mentioned new things):
- corrected the disk-buffer-list bug with read/write-errors
- fixed read-ahead warning messages at end of disk
- better support for text-mode restoration after running MGR and X
- full core-dumping, attach/detach etc debugging features
- 16550A support
- less low 1MB memory used for kernel structures
- various minor fixes
Note that the fact that new versions (pl4 and above) use more memory in
the 1M+ area means that linux will report less free memory (it's used
for buffer-cache instead). This could concievably be a problem on 2MB
machines. The standard kernel comes with only 4 pty's though, and if
you use the standard 80x25 text modes instead of svga modes, the VC
buffers will be smaller. Please contact me if there are problems even
with this minimal setup.
0.96b does /not/ contain: the new scsi drivers, new filesystems or some
other patches I have gotten (ibm character set mode, loop-devices etc).
If you have sent me any other patch, you might want to remind me about
it.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:01 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
32-bit inodes: patch4
Ok, patch4 implements 32-bit inode numbers (and thus the new
stat/lstat/fstat system calls), as well as correcting the bad
rs-performance on some machines that showed up in patch3. It's
currently only on banjo, but I'll copy it around eventually.
Again, you don't miss much if you don't use this patch: it's mainly for
(a) the serial problems and (b) for hlu etc that want to test out the
32-bit interface. It does some other magical tricks as well (uses less
memory in the low 1M region by moving the screen and tty buffer to high
memory), if anybody is interested.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:01 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
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 Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:01 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
Second patch to 0.96a
I have just sent off the second patch to 0.96a: it should be on the
normal ftp-sites (nic, tsx-11 and banjo), although the only site which I
can make it directly readable on is banjo, so on the other sites it will
take the site-managers to make the patch available.
Patch 2 implements:
- itimers (by Darren Senn), which are now also used to implement the
alarm() system call.
- ultrastor scsi driver patches (by gentzel)
- [f]statfs() system call is implemented (so df can be made fs-
independent). Also some other minor fs-changes for the upcoming new
filesystem. Patches by Remy Card.
- preliminary core-file dumping code (linux creates a core-file, but
it's not in the correct format yet [*]).
- minor changes/bugfixes.
While patching in patch1 is a good idea for anybody, patch 2 isn't
really vital. I've made it available just so kernel hackers can keep up
with the kernel I have right now if they wish. Patch 2 is relative to
patch 1: you have to patch that in first.
[*] The current core-file is very simple, and the kernel code is there
just so that some enterprising character can expand it. A core-file
looks like this right now:
offset data
0x0000 "core-dump: regs=\n"
0x0040 struct pt_regs (see <sys/ptrace.c>)
0x0400 "floating-point regs:\n"
0x0440 struct i387 (see <linux/sched.h>)
0x0800 the first 1kB of user-space
Not very practical, but it /might/ help if the X-server dies of a
segmentation fault or similar (you can use pt_regs.eip to see where it
happened). The kernel code is very easy to change to accomodate for the
real core-file format, I just didn't know what it should be.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:00 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
Here is the patch to 0.96a that corrects the harddisk error bug, dup2()
and X11 text-mode restoration. Thanks to Rick Sladkey for finding the
dup2() bug.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:00 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.96a (May 22, 1992 ??)
More VFS cleanups. Minixfs code reorganized to be more logical, and
split up into a few new files.
SCSI support!!
- Drew Eckhardt does the SCSI stuff, and does the ST01/ST02 lowlevel
driver.
- Ultrastor driver by David Gentzel.
- Tommy Thorn shows up again. He did the Danish keyboard tables, now
he does the AHA 1542 driver. Ten years later we ended up being
co-workers at Transmeta ;)
First networking code appears: X11 port needs UNIX domain sockets, and
thus the "socketcall()" system call. It's not really meant for real
networking, although the code will eventually evolve to support that.
Which explains some of the bad early decisions.. ;)
Werner Almerberger starts taking over floppy driver maintenance. Thank
Gods!
Johan Myreen translates my assembly-level keyboard driver into C code,
and adds support for diacriticals.
OMAGIC a.out format support
Syslog support for the kernel appears. If I remember correctly, this
was Peter MacDonald, but no mention of that in the sources.
Linus Torvalds [Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:09:00 +0000 (15:09 -0500)]
[PATCH] Linux-0.95c+ (April 9, 1992 ??)
Bruce Evans shows up here quickly.
Bruce was the author of the Minix/386 patches, and had been one of my
sounding boards for my early development, so it was very gratifying to
see him get interested in Linux. As it turned out, what he was _really_
interested in was the serial driver, and the Linux serial driver was
already in reasonably good shape.
As a result, Bruce went off to work on 386BSD instead (where the serial
driver was truly crappy), but here he worked on some boot loader cleanups.
Bruce was my hero.
Anyway... More VFS work here: readdir, bmap and ioctl's are now virtual
operations, and the superblock code is properly virtualized.
Other changes:
- James Wiegand writes initial parallell port printer driver
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