From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) Subject: Re: Linux 0.13? Date: 2 Mar 1992 01:31:47 GMT
In article <68076@netnews.upenn.edu> dsimon@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Derron Simon) writes:
>When is version 0.13 scheduled to be released? I don't want to hassle with
>all the patches and updates to 0.12 so I'd like to wait until 0.13 if it is
>not going to be long from now.
I'm putting in the finishing touches this week: 0.13 should be out next
weekend at the latest (unless some new bug shows up), and I hope to get
it ready by Thursday. I'll definitely call it 0.95, making clear that
version 1.0 isn't that far away.
0.95 will have these features:
- faster floppy (based on cdiffs by entropy (Lawrence Foard), but I
didn't patch in the formatting code). Untaring from a floppy is no
longer a pain.
- VFS-stubs (based on cdiffs by proven (Chris Provenzo), but again my
version does not contain all of his code, and I added some changes of
my own too.)
- Better VC handling (works on other cards that EGA/VGA), thanks to
pmacdona (Peter McDonald). I think 0.13 finally contains most of the
VC code things: screen blanking, corrected vt100-codes etc.
- Swapon system call (swapping from files as well as block devices),
based on patches by Simmule Turner. This one needs some additional
work still.
- poe-IGL-1.2 (or close to it).
- ptrace (by Ross Biro) - not guaranteed, but I think we'll get gdb
working in 0.95.
- bugfixes and minor enhancements: file protections, nonblocking IO,
UK and Danish keyboards, rename etc.
Most of the patches have been heavily edited by me (indeed, very few of
them are patched in automatically with 'patch'), and not all of the
functionality of all the patches will be there. I've mostly written in
the patches by hand, so the author of the code will not necessarily even
recognize his own work. As with the VC patches, some of these patches
will probably evolve for a few releases before they get their final form
(especially VFS which was easily the biggest patch to date).
Changes that haven't been seen as patches that will be in 0.95:
- many minor corrections (rename corrected, ^S/^Q corrected, better (?)
buffer-cache handling, some corrected error-returns).
- lockup bugs (two of them) removed: I hope that was the last of them
(yeah, sure..).
- minor race-conditions with swapping removed (still not 100%, but
better, and I hope the "block already free'd" error should go away)
- TIOCxWINSZ works now.
- Harddisk changes: the second harddisk will be on minor numbers 64-127
instead of 5-9 as now. I also have some code there that hopefully
gets extended partitions right, but as I haven't been able to test it
I somehow doubt it works 100% ... The default harddisk names have
changed: here's a simple listing
new minor old minor
hda 0 hd0 0
hda1 1 hd1 1
hda2 2 hd2 2
hda3 3 hd3 3
hda4 4 hd4 4
hda5 5 (extended) - -
hdaX X -- "" -- - -
hdb 64 hd5 5
hdb1 65 hd6 6
etc
I'm guessing this will get some people confused, but the old naming
and numbering conventions were so bad as to be pretty unusable with
extended partitions. Fdisk currently doesn't understand extended
partitions: I'll try to get that corrected too.
Patches available now, but NOT in 0.95:
- printer port patch. I still haven't gotten around to this one, as I
haven't got a printer. So sue me.
- SCSI driver: didn't make it in time. I don't expect too many problems
applying the 0.12-patch to 0.95.
- mmap patch: not in time, and so specialized I felt there wasn't that
much of a hurry. Again, this patch should probably patch into 0.95
without undue problems.
So: I hope 0.13 should prove to be more stable, and more easily
extensible, but it will look mostly like 0.12 with a init/login. No
/major/ new features like in eariler releases: I hope that means linux
is getting more mature rather than stagnating :)
Linus