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  1. 23 Nov, 2007 18 commits
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      Import 1.1.77 · 30714577
      Linus Torvalds authored
      30714577
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      Import 1.1.67 · 079e34c1
      Linus Torvalds authored
      079e34c1
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      Import 1.1.15 · 7eb2fd0c
      Linus Torvalds authored
      7eb2fd0c
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      [PATCH] Linux-0.99.14 (November 28, 1993) · 7e842588
      Linus Torvalds authored
      Original Changelog:
      
      CHANGES since 0.99 patchlevel 13:
      
       - new kernel source layout: drivers separated
       - lots of networking bugs fixed, and new network card drivers (Alan Cox,
         Donald Becker &co)
       - sound driver added to the default source distribution (Hannu
         Savolainen)
       - updated SCSI driver code (Eric Youngdale, Drew Eckhardt &co)
       - readonly OS/2 filesystem support (HPFS) added (Chris Smith)
       - NTP support (Philip Gladstone, Torsten Duwe, ??)
       - fixed 16MB swap-area limit
       - lots of minor cleanups, buxfixes etc.
      7e842588
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      [PATCH] Linux-0.99.10 (June 7, 1993) · 9cb9f18b
      Linus Torvalds authored
      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
      9cb9f18b
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      [PATCH] Linux-0.99.7 (March 13, 1993) · f65d0bc9
      Linus Torvalds authored
      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
      f65d0bc9
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      [PATCH] Linux-0.99.6 (February 21, 1993) · 64e05a91
      Linus Torvalds authored
      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
      64e05a91
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      [PATCH] Linux-0.99 (December 13, 1992) · ad094925
      Linus Torvalds authored
      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
      ad094925
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      [PATCH] Linux-0.98.6 (December 2, 1992) · c0cf5000
      Linus Torvalds authored
      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
      c0cf5000
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      [PATCH] Linux-0.98.4 (November 9, 1992) · 3820d961
      Linus Torvalds authored
      Rename "malloc()/free()" as "kmalloc()/kfree()" to make people more
      aware of some of the limitations.
      
      Math emulator updates to handle the case that Linux (unlike the original
      djgpp target) can get preempted by user space accesses.
      
      Make "ll_rw_blk()" take an array of blocks to read/write.
      
      VFS "notify_change()" callback, to allow the low-level filesystem to
      decide what it wants to do about metadata changes.
      
      Deprecate old "stat()" call by printing out a warning on use.
      
      NR_OPEN is now 256 files per process, and the old "unsigned long" bitops
      needed to go away. This causes lots of syntactic changes in select().
      
      System call tracing implemented for ptrace().
      
      [Original announcement below]
      
       - the inode caching bug (resulting in bad filesystem info when
         mounting/umounting devices) should be gone for good.
      
       - an elusive race-condition in the fs is fixed: this may have been the
         reason some people got fsck errors once in a while.  The
         race-condition was pretty hard to find, and depends on a lot of
         things (buffer cache size, speed of the disk and computer speed).
      
       - fpu emulator patches (mainly for the re-entrancy problem) by me and
         W. Metzenthen.
      
       - various wait-queue changes - the kernel uses the waiting mechanism
         more efficiently now.
      
       - the NFS client support code is there: the actual nfs code is still in
         alpha (although reported to be pretty stable) and has to be gotten
         separately.
      
       - NR_OPEN was changed from 32 to 256 (which is what SunOS seems to use,
         so I hope it won't need any further changes).  This has lead to some
         incompatibilities (GNU emacs and the term program seem to need
         recompilation to work correctly), as the 'select()' system call has a
         slightly changed interface due to the new fd_set definition.
      
       - the process kernel stack is now on a separate page (needed due to the
         fact that the task_struct has now grown to almost 3kB due to the
         NR_OPEN changes).  This also means 'ps' needs patches..  My patches
         to ps-0.98 are available as 'ps-diff.Z' in the same directory as the
         kernel sources and diffs.
      
       - various other changes: system call tracing by Ross Biro. Changed
         ll_rw_block interface (performance reasons: it will eventually be
         changed to accept several requests at once).  Malloc() was changed
         and renamed to kmalloc() due to the new interface.  Some tcp/ip
         patches (inode counting correction and some other changes).
      
      0.98.4 should hopefully be pretty stable: the main problem areas are
      probably still tcp/ip and some of the tty code.  I'd appreciate
      comments, bug-reports etc.
      
                      Linus
      3820d961
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      [PATCH] Linux-0.97.6 (September 20, 1992) · d9723f6c
      Linus Torvalds authored
      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
      d9723f6c
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      [PATCH] Linux-0.97 (August 1, 1992) · ddc733f4
      Linus Torvalds authored
      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
      ddc733f4
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      [PATCH] Linux-0.96-pre (April 21, 1992) · d1e6fdb2
      Linus Torvalds authored
      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.
      
              Happily this shouldn't break any old binaries.
      
      - some general cleanups
      d1e6fdb2
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      [PATCH] Linux-0.96c (July 4, 1992) · 38da6b16
      Linus Torvalds authored
      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
      38da6b16
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      [PATCH] Linux-0.96b (June 21, 1992) · 0b098c16
      Linus Torvalds authored
      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
      0b098c16
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      [PATCH] Linux-0.96a (May 22, 1992 ??) · c27acf0e
      Linus Torvalds authored
      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.
      c27acf0e
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      [PATCH] Linux-0.95c+ (April 9, 1992 ??) · 6891759b
      Linus Torvalds authored
      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
      
       - major/minor fault tracking
      
       - I rewrote big chunks of ptrace.c
      6891759b
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      [PATCH] Linux-0.95 (March 8, 1992) · e6c7a63f
      Linus Torvalds authored
      This was the first kernel that got released under the GPL (0.12 had a
      time-lapse to make sure the people involved accepted the license change:
      nobody ever complained).
      
      Because 0.12 had been so successful, this was supposed to be closer to
      1.0.  Yeah, right.  1.0 was eventually released almost exactly two years
      later..
      
      The big change here is the first signs of a real VFS layer: while the
      only available filesystem is still the Minix-compatible one, the code is
      factored out, and the Minix-specific stuff is put in its own directory.
      You can clearly see how the thing is moving towards having multiple
      different filesystems.
      
      The VFS changes also cause cleanups in various drivers, since we end
      up having more clear inode operation structure pointer handling.
      
      Superblock handling is still minix-specific..
      
      NOTE! We also have /bin/init finally.  It still falls through to the old
      "run shells forever" case if no init can be found, but it's starting to
      look a whole more like real UNIX user-land now..
      
      New developers: Ross Biro shows up, and does ptrace.  He will later end
      up doing the first-generation networking code.
      
      Other changes:
      
       - UK and Danish keyboard maps (and the keyboard driver supported
         "Application mode" keys from vt100+)
       - Make sure interrupts clear the 'D'irection flag
       - Floppy driver gets track buffer, which speeds it up immensely.  This
         was done based on patches by Lawrence Foard (entropy@wintermute.wpi.edu)
       - Lots of buffer cache cleanups.
       - support nonblocking pipe file descriptors
       - recursive symlink support
       - sys_swapon() means that we don't have to select the swap device
         at build (or boot) time ("Written 01/25/92 by Simmule Turner, heavily
         changed by Linus")
       - start some generic timer work (ugh, but these first timers were
         _horrible_ hardcoded things)
       - ptrace for debugging
       - console size query support with TIOC[G|S]WINSZ
       - /dev/kmem ("by Damiano")
       - rebooting (with ctrl-alt-del or sys_reboot()).
      
      From the release notes:
      
                    New features of 0.95, in order of appearance
                            (ie in the order you see them)
      
            Init/login
      
      Yeah, thanks to poe (Peter Orbaeck (sp?)), linux now boots up like a
      real unix with a login-prompt.  Login as root (no passwd), and change
      your /etc/passwd to your hearts delight (and add other logins in
      /etc/inittab etc).
      
            Bash is even bigger
      
      It's really a bummer to boot up from floppies: bash takes a long time to
      load.  Bash is also now so big that I couldn't fit compress and tar onto
      the root-floppy: You'll probably want the old rootimage-0.12 just in
      order to get tar+compress onto your harddisk.  If anybody has pointers
      to a simple shell that is freely distributable, it might be a good idea
      to use that for the root-diskette.
      
      Especially with a small buffer-cache, things aren't fun. Don't worry:
      linux runs much better on a harddisk.
      
            Virtual consoles on any (?) hardware.
      
      You can select one of several consoles by pressing the left alt-key and
      a function key at the same time. Linux should report the number of
      virtual consoles available upon bootup. /dev/tty0 is now "the current"
      screen, /dev/tty1 is the main console, and /dev/tty2-8 can exist
      depending on your text-mode or card.
      
      The virtual consoles also have some new screen-handling commands: they
      confirm even better to vt200 control codes than 0.11. Special graphic
      characters etc: you can well use them as terminals to VMS (although
      that's a shameful waste of resources), and the PF1-4 keys work somewhat
      in the application-key mode.
      
            Symbolic links.
      
      0.95 now allows symlinks to point to other symlinks etc (the maximum
      depth is a rather arbitrary 5 links). 0.12 didn't like more than one
      level of indirection.
      
            Virtual memory.
      
      VM under 0.95 should be better than under 0.12: no more lockups (as far
      as I have seen), and you can now swap to the filesystem as well as to a
      special partition. There are two programs to handle this: mkswap to set
      up a swap-file/partition and swapon to start up swapping.
      
      mkswap needs either a partition or a file that already exists to make a
      swap-area. To make a swap-file, do this:
      
            # dd bs=1024 count=NN if=/dev/hda of=swapfile
            # mkswap swapfile NN
      
      The first command just makes a file that is NN blocks long (initializing
      it from /dev/hda, but that could be anything). The second command then
      writes the necessary setup-info into the file. To start swapping, write
      
            # swapon swapfile
      
      NOTE! 'dd' isn't on the rootdisk: you have to install some things onto
      the harddisk before you can get up and running.
      
      NOTE2! When linux runs totally out of virtual memory, things slow down
      dramatically. It tries to keep on running as long as it can, but at
      least it shouldn't lock up any more. ^C should work, although you might
      have to wait a while for it..
      
            Faster floppies
      
      Ok, you don't notice this much when booting up from a floppy: bash has
      grown, so it takes longer to load, and the optimizations work mostly
      with sequential accesses.  When you start un-taring floppies to get the
      programs onto your harddisk, you'll notice that it's much faster now.
      That should be about the only use for floppies under a unix: nobody in
      their right mind uses floppies as filesystems.
      
            Better FS-independence
      
      Hopefully you'll never even notice this, but the filesystem has been
      partly rewritten to make it less minix-fs-specific. I haven't
      implemented all the VFS-patches I got, so it's still not ready, but it's
      getting there, slowly.
      
            And that's it, I think.
      
      Happy hacking.
      
                            Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
      e6c7a63f