From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Torvalds) Subject: ANNOUNCE: 0.98.pl2 is out Date: 18 Oct 1992 14:45:46 GMT
[ I already sent this to the mailing-list, nothing new, so skip this if
you already saw it ]
Patch 2 to 0.98 is out - it's available as both full source and as
patches against 0.98.1 at nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus (and
testing is still unreadable, so you have to cd to it blindly).
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