ANNOUNCE: Linux 0.98 pl5

You all know what it's about by now: YAKR (yet another kernel release..)
linux 0.98 patchlevel 5 is now available at nic.funet.fi as both full
source and as context diffs against 0.98.4. The place to look is (as
before) pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus.

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).