0.96a available
Oh, well, no use in delaying it any more, so I sent out my latest
release to nic.funet.fi, tsx-11.mit.edu and banjo.concert.net. They
should show up in the next couple of days (they are already visible on
banjo: /pub/Linux/Linus). I hope all the bugs got fixed, but I did
something potentially stupid:
I had expected that lankaster wouldn't get his hd-speedup patches ready
for 0.96a, and I was resigned to the same hd-performance as with all
older releases. But when I saw them on the newsgroup today I thought
I'd try them out just in case, as I could always use my backup-version
if they backfired...
The point here is that the patch ended up in 0.96a after some minor
edits by me (one benign bug and some editing due to changed files). So
now hd-performance is much better on most operations. I just hope it
doesn't result in yet another release just to fix new bugs (but I doubt
it: the patches were really minor and clean - no ugly hacks needed I'm
happy to say). Branko already posted benchmarks, and I can only confirm
that it's indeed snappier, especially on writes. syncing is no longer a
pain even after heavy writing.
Other than the hd-performance, there are no new features I haven't
already mentioned in other posts. Bug-fixes, rewrites in C, better
debugging. I haven't made the cdiffs yet, so right now the new release
is only available as complete source and as a binary, but I'll try to
get patches done tonight. Possibly tomorrow. The patches will be
against the original 0.96, and shouldn't be too big.
Linus
PS. No need for more 16550 info: even if somebody doesn't implement it
for the next release, I think I can get it going. Doesn't seem too
hard. I'll also start to look into core-files. Eventually. Promise.
PPS. Ja 0.96a on taas saatavilla klaavasta /usr/tmp/linux'ssa
yliopistolla kirjoilla oleville.
-----
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Subject: 0.96a out today/tomorrow
Date: 21 May 1992 12:19:55 GMT
The subject say it all: I haven't heard any bad results (except somewhat
worse performance on the serial lines) from the testimage testers, so
I'll make 0.96a available tonight (Finnish time: EST) or tomorrow.
tsx-11, nic and banjo will be the sites I'll upload it to.
0.96a doesn't have any major new features: I just tried to correct known
bugs and get a stable version out the door. I hope 0.96 won't need any
more interim releases, but we'll see.
0.96a has gone back to non-interruptible hd-interrupts, and as long as
I'm not sure about the reason for the need of this, it's going to stay
that way. I hope this new version will run on all drives that have been
supported in the past, and the only known remaining problem is the Kalok
drives which have spurious interrupts. That's definitely a hardware
problem, and Branko Lankaster has patches that fake away these..
0.96a should also correct most of the serial line problems, and the
keyboard driver is now in C - I expect somebody will change it to allow
run-time keyboard changing. Additionally, there are various minor fixes
in various places:
- the kill fix by tytso that allows any process to wake up a stopped
process as long as it's in the same session.
- chown fix by card and me. Users can chgrp files they own to any group
they belong to etc - _POSIX_CHOWN_RESTRICTED should now be implemented
correctly. Also, chown() on a symlink now actually chown's the symlink
and not the file it points to (but GNU fileutils don't seem to want to
chown symlinks anyway - or maybe I have an older version)
- SIGSEGV fix by lankaster (?) which allows for better debugging after
protection faults. Most such errors are now trappable in gdb
(although some circumstances can still result in the process exiting
at once: out-of-memory errors etc)
I have also changed the memory manager to check for illegal memory
references (ie using the area between brk and stack), so debugging bad
pointer references should be much easier. This fix will hopefully also
trap the uncompress problem with bad files, but I haven't tried it out.
Programs can still call brk() with any value, so it doesn't mean that
you can't use up all available memory, but at least this should fix
/bad/ memory references. My limited tests with gdb seems to indicate it
all works nicely.
Core files are still not generated (I haven't got the slightest idea
what format they should have), so debugging isn't perfect yet, but it
should certainly be much easier.
Linus
-----
[ Committer's note: this commit also folds the lost 0.96 release. ]
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Subject: 0.96 uploaded
Date: 12 May 1992 16:51:12 GMT
Well, the title says it all: I've sent off 0.96 to banjo.concert.net,
where it can be found in pub/Linux/Linus along with a new bootimage and
a program for formatting floppies under linux (which works only under
0.96).
I've also sent it to tsx-11.mit.edu and I'll send it to nic as soon as
the lines clear up.
General warning about 0.96:
- the scsi code is in the kernel, but I haven't personally tested it,
so who knows... The SCSI code also results in a 4-5 second pause at
bootup with the current bootimage, while it searches for an adapter:
if you find this disturbing, you have to recompile the kernel with the
appropriate changes to config.h.
- The harddisk timings have changed: the testimage got a generally good
review, but it hasn't been tested very much. The changes seem to help
at least some "HD times out" problems, but there might be new bugs..
- The serial code was totally rewritten this weekend, and I haven't
tested it out under any heavier load. I found one bug as late as
today, and there might be others lurking around.
- There have been generally pretty heavy rewrites: it's binary
compatible with the old kernels, but the changes might not all be
correct. Oh, well.
That said, I hope 0.96 will be an improvement on earlier versions, and
most of the old bugs corrected. If the new version still has some
problem - please mail me with a new bugreport. Otherwise I'll just
assume the problem went away: I'm afraid don't have time to go through
old mail searching for any bugs that might still be in there.
Partial list of features:
- automatic floppy detection. Please add the following devices:
mknod /dev/fd0 b 2 0
mknod /dev/fd1 b 2 1
which act as A and B floppies respectively, finding out automatically
what kind of disk there is.
The floppy driver now also contains a timeout, so an empty diskdrive
no longer results in a floppy driver hang.
- serial lines now support dropping DTR on closing, and sending SIGHUP
to the process group that is logged in on a serial line. It's also a
lot easier to change the interrupts etc of the lines.
- unix sockets supported for X, as well as mmap() on /dev/mem etc.
- pty's corrected. Hopefully no more hangs under X due to pty trouble.
- better IO-performance when there are computationally intensive jobs in
the background or on another VC. Partly due to new scheduler
mechanism, partly due to read-ahead on normal files.
- cleaned up vfs layer.
- no more mismatched children
- minor corrections all over the place.
The new release is in fact different enough that there is no use trying
to make context diffs: files have disappeared, others are new, others
have simply changed a lot. Even compared to pre-0.96 there has been
quite a lot of changes.
Linus
-----
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Subject: 0.96 out next week
Date: 4 May 1992 07:38:03 GMT
Ok, the subject says most of it: I'll send out 0.96 sometimes next week
(ie 92.05.11-17), and this is just an announcement to confirm that.
0.96 has a lot of changes (even relative to pre-0.96), and it's entirely
possible that making it available as cdiffs isn't feasible. It contains
a lot of new files, as well as some re-organizations in the old ones.
Main new things are:
- The SCSI distribution is now in the standard package. I (obviously)
haven't been able to test my patchings, so there might be problems in
this first release. I had to do some changes "blind" to the cdiffs,
but most of them were pretty trivial.
- X11r5 as ported by obz is supported. It's still in beta-testing (join
the X11-channel on the original mailing-list), but as I'm writing this
from an xterm under linux, it works pretty well. Changes to pre-0.96
are just the socket-code by obz, and some small tweaking by me.
- Hopefully better interrupt latency - I've changed select() not to use
cli-sti, and most IRQ's to enable interrupts, and instead disable just
their own interrupt-line. The interrupt latency has been noticeable at
higher serial speeds, and I hope 0.96 will be better in this respect.
Again, I only have 2400bps, so I've never seen the problems, and
cannot guarantee the new version will help. (btw, I hope the problems
with select are gone now)
- Reorganisation of the vfs routines and minix filesystem driver. These
shouldn't bother anyone but people that have implemented their own
filesystems (I know of just 2 to date), but I hope the current
vfs-interface will prove to be relatively stable. The new vfs
interface has made some things much cleaner, and the promised cleanup
of special devices has happened.
- ps/uptime patches + added readahead, so having computationally
intensive background processes isn't as noticeable any more when doing
IO.
Additionally, there /might/ be a new floppy-driver that supports
formatting and autodetecting floppies, but I haven't had time to check
into it yet.
There are probably any number of minor changes: I've lost track. People
have sent me some diffs, and some of them went in, depending on how
energetic I was that day. I've tried to correct all the bugs I've
gotten reports on, and hopefully 0.96 will work with just about
everything (gdb etc).
Things I wanted, but didn't have time for:
- The config patches aren't there. Sorry everybody. That means still no
wd8003 driver etc.
- Any number of minor patches (quota, auto-SVGA etc)
Generally, 0.96 is cleaning some things up, but on the other hand the
new features can have their share of problems. We'll see. Anyway, most
things seem to work, and I hope there won't be the same type of problems
as with the first 0.95 release.
Linus
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