From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Torvalds) Subject: Linux version 0.98-pl4 Date: 9 Nov 1992 11:22:01 GMT
As the subject probably tells you, pl4 is out. It's currently available
at least on nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus/, but will probably
show up on the other major sites very soon.
pl4 is available both as complete source (linux-0.98.4.tar.Z) and as
patches against pl3 (linux-0.98.patch4.Z) and against the pre-version
that was released for limited testing (pre-patch4.Z or something like
that). Things that have changed:
- 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