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Summary: Linux 1.0 released
Keywords: Linux Kernel 1.0 Academy Awards
X-Moderator-Added-Keywords: universe, end of
Finally, here it is. Almost on time (being just two years late is
peanuts in the OS industry), and better than ever:
Linux kernel release 1.0
This release has no new major features compared to the pl15 kernels, but
contains lots and lots of bugfixes: all the major ones are gone, the
smaller ones are hidden better. Hopefully there are no major new ones.
The Linux kernel can be found as source on most of the Linux ftp-sites
under the names
linux-1.0.tar.gz (full source)
linux-1.0.patch.pl15.gz (patch against linux-0.99pl15)
linux-1.0.patch.alpha.gz (patch from linux-pre-1.0)
it should be available at least at the sites
ftp.funet.fi:
pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus (now)
sunsite.unc.ed:
pub/Linux/Incoming (now)
pub/Linux/kernel (soon)
tsx-11.mit.edu:
pub/linux/sources/system (soon)
ftp.cs.helsinki.fi:
pub/Software/Linux/Kernel (now)
This release finally moves Linux out of Beta status and is meant as a
base for distributions to build on. It will neither change Linux'
status as FreeWare under the GPL, nor will it mean the end of
development on Linux. In fact many new features where held back for
later releases so that 1.0 could become a well tested and hopefully
stable release.
The Linux kernel wouldn't be where it is today without the help of lots
of people: the kernel developers, the people who did user-level programs
making linux useful, and the brave and foolhardy people who risked their
harddisks and sanity to test it all out. My thanks to you all.
(Editorial note: if you think this sounds too much like the Academy
Awards ceremony, just skip this: it's not getting any better.)
Thanks to people like Aaron Kushner, Danny ter Haar and the authors of
the AnwenderHandbuch (and others) who have helped me with hardware or
monetary donations (and to the Oxford Beer Trolls and others who took
care of the drinkware). And thanks to Dirk, who helped me write this
announcement despite my lazyness ("hey, it's just another release, who
needs an announcement anyway?").
To make a long and boring story a bit shorter and boring, here is at
least a partial list of people who have been helping make Linux what it
is today. Thanks to you all,
Krishna Balasubramanian <balasub@cis.ohio-state.edu>
Arindam Banerji <axb@cse.nd.edu>
Peter Bauer <100136.3530@compuserve.com>
Fred Baumgarten <dc6iq@insu1.etec.uni-karlsruhe.de>
Donald Becker <becker@super.org>
Stephen R. van den Berg <berg@pool.informatik.rwth-aachen.de>
Hennus Bergman <hennus@sky.nl.mugnet.org>
Ross Biro <bir7@leland.Stanford.Edu>
Bill Bogstad <bogstad@cs.jhu.edu>
John Boyd <boyd@cis.ohio-state.edu>
Andries Brouwer <aeb@cwi.nl>
Remy Card <Remy.Card@masi.ibp.fr>
Ed Carp <ecarp@netcom.com>
Raymond Chen <raymondc@microsoft.com>
Alan Cox <iiitac@pyr.swan.ac.uk>
Laurence Culhane <loz@holmes.demon.co.uk>
Wayne Davison <davison@borland.com>
Thomas Dunbar <tdunbar@vtaix.cc.vt.edu>
Torsten Duwe <Torsten.Duwe@informatik.uni-erlangen.de>
Drew Eckhardt <drew@cs.Colorado.EDU>
Bjorn Ekwall <bj0rn@blox.se>
Doug Evans <dje@cygnus.com>
Rik Faith <faith@cs.unc.edu>
Juergen Fischer <fischer@server.et-inf.fho-emden.de>
Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@sw.oz.au>
Ralf Flaxa <rfflaxa@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de>
Nigel Gamble <nigel%gamble.uucp@gate.net>
Philip Gladstone <philipg@onsett.com>
Bruno Haible <haible@ma2s2.mathematik.uni-karlsruhe.de>
Andrew Haylett <ajh@gec-mrc.co.uk>
Dirk Hohndel <hohndel@informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de>
Nick Holloway <alfie@dcs.warwick.ac.uk>
Ron Holt <ron@novell.com>
Rob W. W. Hooft <hooft@EMBL-Heidelberg.DE>
Michael K. Johnson <johnsonm@sunsite.unc.edu>
Fred N. van Kempen <waltje@uwalt.nl.mugnet.org>
Olaf Kirch <okir@monad.swb.de>
Ian Kluft <ikluft@thunder.sbay.org>
Rudolf Koenig <rfkoenig@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de>
Bas Laarhoven <bas@vimec.nl>
Warner Losh <imp@boulder.parcplace.com>
H.J. Lu <hjl@nynexst.com>
Tuomas J. Lukka <Tuomas.Lukka@Helsinki.FI>
Kai M"akisara <Kai.Makisara@vtt.fi>
Pat Mackinlay <pat@it.com.au>
John A. Martin <jmartin@csc.com>
Bradley McLean <brad@bradpc.gaylord.com>
Craig Metz <cmetz@tjhsst.edu>
William (Bill) Metzenthen <billm@vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au>
Rick Miller <rick@discus.mil.wi.us>
Corey Minyard <minyard@wf-rch.cirr.com>
Eberhard Moenkeberg <emoenke@gwdg.de>
Ian A. Murdock <imurdock@shell.portal.com>
Johan Myreen <jem@vipunen.hut.fi>
Stefan Probst <snprobst@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de>
Daniel Quinlan <quinlan@bucknell.edu>
Florian La Roche <rzsfl@rz.uni-sb.de>
Robert Sanders <gt8134b@prism.gatech.edu>
Peter De Schrijver <stud11@cc4.kuleuven.ac.be>
Darren Senn <sinster@scintilla.santa-clara.ca.us>
Chris Smith <csmith@convex.com>
Drew Sullivan <drew@lethe.north.net>
Tommy Thorn <Tommy.Thorn@daimi.aau.dk>
Jon Tombs <jon@gtex02.us.es>
Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Simmule Turner <simmy@digex.com>
Stephen Tweedie <sct@dcs.ed.ac.uk>
Thomas Uhl <uhl@sun1.rz.fh-heilbronn.de>
Juergen Weigert <jnweiger@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de>
Matt Welsh <mdw@sunsite.unc.edu>
Marco van Wieringen <mvw@mercury.mcs.nl.mugnet.org>
Stephen D. Williams <sdw@lig.net>
G\"unter Windau <gunter@mbfys.kun.nl>
Lars Wirzenius <lars.wirzenius@helsinki.fi>
Roger E. Wolff <wolff@dutecai.et.tudelft.nl>
Frank Xia <qx@math.columbia.edu>
Eric Youngdale <eric@tantalus.nrl.navy.mil>
Orest Zborowski <orestz@microsoft.com>
A more detailed list with contact and description information can be
found in the CREDITS file that accompanies the kernel sources.
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[ Message-ID: <2jaihl$21l@klaava.Helsinki.FI> ]
- pl15b mainly fixes some small tty problems.
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[ Message-ID: <2jaihl$21l@klaava.Helsinki.FI> ]
- pl15a fixes the buffer cache growing problem, adds emulation for a
few unimportant floating point instructions (i287 instructions that
are No-Ops on the i387, so "emulating" them is easy :^) and fixes a
silly bug when mmap'ing stuff write-only. It also fixes a buggy lock
in the networking.
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People who look into my directory on ftp.funet.fi will already have
noticed that the latest version of linux (0.99.15) is available, and I
assume it will be available on most other linux sites soon. As
explained in a previous announcement, 0.99.15 is "it", in that this will
be the base for 1.0 after about a month of testing. No further patches
are accepted until the 1.0 release, unless they obviously fix a serious
bug.
**** NOTE 1 ****
For this code-freeze to be effective yet still potential bugs be
found, testing is needed, along with good reports of errors and
problems. Thus, nobody should think "hey, the *real* release will be
out in a month, let's wait for that", but instead think: "hey, I'd
better test this one, so that the *real* release won't result in any
ugly surprises for me".
In short: test it out, preferably even more than you usually do. Run
"crashme" for the whole month if you have the CPU-power to spare,
and/or just misuse your machine as badly as you can. And if there are
problems, report them to me (and the better the report, the more
likely I am to be able to do something about it).
**** NOTE 2 ****
Bumping the linux version number to 1.0 doesn't mean anything more
than that: it's only a version number change. More explicitly, it
does *NOT* mean that linux will become commercial (the copyright will
remain as-is), nor does it mean that development stops here, and that
1.0 will be anything special in that respect.
I'm also afraid that just changing the version number will not make
potential bugs magically disappear: this has been amply proven by
various software houses over the years. This code-freeze is there in
order to avoid most of the problems that people sometimes associate
with "X.0 releases", and I hope that it will mean that we have a
reasonably stable release that we can call 1.0 and one that I won't
have to be ashamed of.
Ok, enough said, I hope. The pl15 release is hopefully good, but I'll
continue to make ALPHA patches against it along the whole month as
problems crop up. The networking code has been much maligned, and is
not perfect by far yet, but it's getting its act together thanks to
various developers and testers. And as wiser men than I have said (or
if they haven't, they should have):
"There is life after 1.0"
Any rumors that the world is coming to an end just because I'm about to
release a 1.0-version are greatly exaggerated. I think.
Linus
----------
Things that remained the same between 0.99.14 and 0.99.15:
- I again forgot to update the README before uploading the release. In
pl14, I talked about pl13, while the all new and improved README has
now caught up with pl14. Remind me to buy a new brain one of these
days.
Changes between versions 0.99.14 and 0.99.15:
- improved Pentium detection. Some of you may have had linux report
your 4086DX2 as a pentium machine, but the new kernel will tell you
the sad truth. Whee.
- Network driver updates by Donald Becker. New drivers added, old ones
updated.
- FPU emulation updates by Bill Metzenthen. Various minor errors and
misfeatures fixed (mostly error handling).
- Support for the SoubdBlaster Pro CD-ROM driver added by Eberhard
Moenkeberg.
- extended support for keyboard re-definition, along with font
re-programming (Eugene Crosser, Andries Brouwer et al).
- tty handling fixes: true canonical mode with most features supported
by Julian Cowley. This may make your canonical mode behave funnily
if you happen to use old and broken programs that happened to work
with the old and broken behaviour (this includes at least some
'getty' programs).
- serial driver changes and tty fixes by Theodore Ts'o.
- SCSI fixes by Drew Eckhardt, Eric Youngdale, Rik Faith, Kai Mdkisara
et al.
- Updated sound card driver to version 2.4 (Hannu Savolainen)
- COFF binary loading support (but you will still need the experimental
iBCS2 patches to run non-linux i386 COFF binaries) by Al Longyear.
- Upgraded ext2fs filesystem routines (0.4a -> 0.4b), with new
features. Read the fs/ext2/CHANGES file for details. Remy Card and
Stephen Tweedie. Get a new fsck that knows about the new features.
- pipe behaviour fixed in the presense of multiple writers (now
actually conforms to POSIX specs about atomic writes). Much of the
code by Florian Coosmann.
- minix filesystem extended to support the clean flag: get a new fsck
that knows about it.
- System V filesystem (support for Xenix, Coherent and SysV
filesystems) by Doug Evans, Paul Monday, Pascal Haible and Bruno
Haible.
- loadable modules (various authors, don't remember original author of
the "modules" code).
- Lots of networking fixes by various people: Alan Cox, Charles
Hedrick, me and various other people. Non-byte-aligned networks
work, and the networking code should be much stabler in general.
+ various bugfixes and enhacements here and there (mcd driver update by
Jon Tombs, atixlmouse fix by Chris Colohan, /dev/full by XXX etc etc)
All in all, the patches come out to 1.5MB uncompressed (about 400kB
gzip-9'd), so there is little or no idea to make patches to plain pl14
available. Incremental patches and ALPHA-releases can be found on
ftp.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus/ALPHA-pl14.
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[...]
From: torvalds@cc.helsinki.fi (Linus Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce
Subject: Linux 1.0 codefreeze imminent
Date: 18 Jan 1994 23:40:37 +0200
This is a general announcement of the imminent code-freeze that will
hopefully make linux 1.0 a reality. The plan has been discussed a bit
with various developers already, and is already late, but is still in
effect otherwise.
In short, the next version of linux (0.99.15) will be a "full-featured"
release, and only obvious bug-fixes to existing features will be applied
before calling it 1.0. If this means that your favourite feature or
networking version won't make it, don't despair: there is life even
after beta (and it's probably not worth mailing me about it any more:
I've seen quite a few favourite features already ;-).
In fact, 1.0 has little "real meaning", as far as development goes, but
should be taken as an indication that it can be used for real work
(which has been true for some time, depending on your definition of
"real work"). Development won't stop or even slow down: some of it has
even been shelved pending a 1.0 already.
Calling it 1.0 will not necessarily make all bugs go away (quite the
opposite, judging by some other programs), but I hope it will be a
reasonably stable release. In order to accomplish this, the code-freeze
after 0.99.15 will be about a month, and I hope people will test out
that kernel heavily, instead of waiting for "the real release" so that
any potential bugs can be found and fixed.
As to where we are now: as of this moment, the latest release is the 'r'
version of pl14 (aka "ALPHA-pl14r"). I've made ALPHA releases available
on ftp.funet.fi almost daily, and expect a final pl15 within a few more
days. Testing out the ALPHA releases is not discouraged either if you
like recompiling kernels every day or two..
And finally: we also try to create a "credits" file that mentions the
developers of the kernel and essential linux utilities. The credit file
compilator is jmartin@opus.starlab.csc.com (John A. Martin), and if you
feel you have cause to be mentioned in it, please contact him.
Linus
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Linux 0.99 patchlevel 14 is available on nic.funet.fi in the usual place
(pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus). There are no diffs relative to pl13, as
too much has changed (the directory structure changed and the sound
driver was added). Diffs relative to the last ALPHA version (13t) are
in the "pl13-ALPHA's" subdirectory along with the actual ALPHA versions.
The changes to pl13t are rather minor: most of them are just more printf
format fixes to make gcc-2.5.x happy (Chip Salzenberg). Only one very
minor bugfix which made pl13t not notice the WP bit on a 486.
It would seem to be a good idea to use gcc-2.5.x to compile the kernel,
as that seems to fix at least one known bug in earlier gcc versions. I
hope that pl14 will be even more stable than pl13 has turned out to be,
and especially the networking code seems to have become much more
dependable. Thanks Alan & co.
Changes to the last official release (p13) are too numerous to mention
(or even to remember), but they include NTP support, updated SCSI and
networking drivers, >16MB swap area handling, added sound support,
read-only HPFS filesystem, memory management cleanups (especially
cleaned up mmap() some more). Also, pl14 contains updated ext2fs code,
along with minor fixes (especially concerning the time values) in other
filesystems, and fixed unnamed/named pipe select() semantics.
The reorganizations include moving all device drivers to a subdirectory
of their own (linux/drivers), centralizing the major number handling
(<linux/major.h> etc... Possibly cleaner and/or easier to keep track of
different drivers. Finally, the first 4kB of physical memory is no
longer cleared on bootup: tytso reports that this feature now enables
some portables to use the power-saving features under linux. This could
also be useful for the DOS emulator to check where the interrupt
pointers pointed at startup.
Linus
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[ Committer's note: This is the only 0.99.13+ release that could be
found. It is extracted from a private copy apparently from "aeb"
and possibly non pristine. Its date must be approximate as well. ]
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Linux 0.99pl13 has been released (for almost a week no, actually, sorry
for the delayed announcement), and can be found on nic.funet.fi in
pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus and mirror sites.
Rough changes since pl12 (most of which have been there in various ALPHA
versions):
- the bad memory management one-liner bug is naturally fixed.
- compiled with plain C by default instead of C++
- ELF binary support (Eric Youngdale)
- Quickport mouse support (and some changes to the PS/2 mouse driver)
by Johan Myreen and co)
- core file name change ("core" -> "core.xxxx" where xxxx is the name
of the program that dumped code). Idea from ???. Also, core-files
now correctly truncate any existing core file before being written.
- some mmap() fixes: better error returns, and handling of non-fixed
maps for /dev/mem etc.
- fixes for rename/unlink/rmdir at mount-points.
- packet mode fixes by Charles Hedrick. Sadly, these are likely to
break old telnet/rlogin binaries, but it had to be done in order to
communicate correctly with the rest of the world.
- FPU emulator patches from Bill Metzenthen. The fprem1 insn should be
correct now (not that anybody seems to have seen the incorrect
behaviour..)
- a few fixes for SCSI (Drew and Eric)
- signal.c changes to handle multiple segments (for Wine) correctly.
- updated drivers from Donald Becker: 3c509 and AT1500 drivers, but
also some other drivers have been edited, and some networking fixes.
Note that I have gotten a lot of patches that simply didn't make it: I
think I have 5-10 reasonable patches that I simply never got around to
check very carefully but that have their own reasons for existence,
ranging from sysv signal handling to quotas. They'll probably get there
eventually, but didn't make it into pl13.
Linus
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I hate to put out patches this soon after a release, but there is one
potentially major problem in pl12 which is very simple to fix.. I'm
including patches: both in plain ascii and as a uuencoded gzip file
(it's the same patch - the uuencoded one is in case there is any
newsserver that messes up whitespace).
The main patch is just the change from __get_free_page(GFP_BUFFER) into
get_free_page(GFP_KERNEL), and the two minor patches just add checks
that actually enforce the read-only nature of current file mmap'ings so
that any program that tries to do a write mapping at least will be told
that it won't work.
I'd suggest anybody compiling pl12 should add at least the file_table.c
patch: thanks to Alexandre Julliard for noticing this one.
Linus
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As promised, the 0.99.12 kernel made it out this weekend: it's
essentially the last ALPHA-pl12 with some minor changes that shouldn't
break anything (famous last words) while they should be a boon
especially for NFS users.
Nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus now contains the 0.99.12 kernel
as both full source (linux-0.99.12.tar.gz) and as patches against pl11
(linux-0.99.patch12.gz). It's usually easier to get the full sources:
expecially due to some cosmetic fixes the patches are pretty large.
Note that kbd.tar.gz (at the same place as the kernel) has been updated
yet again to fix some problems with the Swiss keyboard mappings. Hope
that caught the last of these problems. Also note that the manual pages
in kbd.tar.gz aren't up-to-date but that the format of the keyboard
files shouldn't really pose any problems as they are pretty self-
explanatory (the man-pages will be fixed eventually, probabably not by
me).
Also note that the pl12 kernel is more strict about routing entries, and
that there is a bug in the 4.4.1 library which may make adding routes
extremely difficult (especially if you try to add a C-net route that has
been subnetted from a B-net). Libc-4.4.2 fixes the problem, but if you
don't use subnetting or any other special netmasks, you'll never see the
bug anyway.
I'm including some of the README so that people can see what's new..
Linus
PS. The network card configs are now in the main "make config", but you
should check the net/inet/CONFIG file as well anyway. Also, the 3c509
driver is probably not functional yet, so don't get too excited.
----------
Linux kernel release 0.99 patchlevel 12
These are the release notes for linux version 0.99.12. Read them
carefully, as they tell you what's new, explain how to install the
kernel, and what to do if something goes wrong.
NOTE! There has been some indication that gcc versions older than 2.4.5
result in bad kernels being built: 2.3.3 will fail even to build the
kernel, and I have at least one report of trouble with a 2.4.3-built
kernel that went away when the kernel was recompiled with 2.4.5.
CHANGES since 0.99 patchlevel 11 and earlier:
- The memory manager cleanup has continued, and seems to be mostly
ready, as proven by the ease of adding mmap() over NFS with the new
routines. So yes, the pl12 kernel will demand-load your binaries
over NFS, sharing code and clean data, as well as running shared
libraries over NFS. Memory management by Eric and me, while the NFS
mmap code was written by Jon Tombs,
- ** IMPORTANT **: The keyboard driver has been enhanced even further,
and almost everything is completely re-mappable. This means that
there is a new version of 'loadkeys' and 'dumpkeys' that you must use
with this kernel or you'll have problems. The default keyboard is
still the US mapping, but if you want to create your own mappings
you'll have to load them with the new binaries. Get the 'kbd.tar.gz'
archive from the same place you get the kernel.
The new keymappings allow things like function key string changes,
remapping of the control keys, and freedom to remap any of the normal
keyboard functions: including special features like rebooting,
console switching etc. The keyboard remapping code has been done
mostly by Risto Kankkunen (Risto.Kankku...@Helsinki.FI).
- updated network drivers by Donald Becker
- updated serial drivers - ty...@Athena.mit.edu
- updated 387 emulation (Bill Metzenthen). The updated emulator code
has more exact trigonometric functions and improved exception
handling. It now behaves very much like a real 486, with only small
changes (greater accuracy, slightly different denormal NaN handling
etc - hard to detect the differences even if you are looking for
them).
- network timer fixes by Florian La Roche (much cleaned up net/inet/timer.c
and some bad race-conditions fixed).
- Scsi code updates by Eric Youngdale and others
- Sony CDU-31A CDROM driver by Corey Minyard added to the standard
kernel distribution.
- The Mitsumi CDROM driver is now part of the standard kernel. Driver
by Martin Harriss with patches by stu...@cc4.kuleuven.ac.be (yes, he
probably has a real name, but no, I haven't found it) and Jon Tombs.
- various other minor patches (preliminary ldt support etc)
[ rest deleted ]
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There is at least one known problem with 0.99pl11 - it's very minor and
will not lead to any real problems, but it's also very easy to fix,
so...
The problem is a one-liner oversight in kernel/fork.c (thanks to TjL for
noticing the symptoms - they aren't easy to see), which is fixed by the
following patch:
----- snip snip -----
--- linux/kernel/fork.c.orig Mon Jul 19 19:09:45 1993
+++ linux/kernel/fork.c Mon Jul 19 16:55:04 1993
@@ -157,7 +157,7 @@
p->tss.cs = KERNEL_CS;
p->tss.ss = KERNEL_DS;
p->tss.ds = KERNEL_DS;
- p->tss.fs = KERNEL_DS;
+ p->tss.fs = USER_DS;
p->tss.gs = KERNEL_DS;
p->tss.ss0 = KERNEL_DS;
p->tss.esp0 = p->kernel_stack_page + PAGE_SIZE;
----- snip snip -----
In fact, it's probably easiest to "apply" this patch by hand: just
change the "p->tss.fs = KERNEL_DS" in fork.c to "p->tss.fs = USER_DS"
and you should be fine.
Linus
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Nic.funet.fi now contains the newest linux kernel: this is 0.99
patchlevel 11. I've had a few problems with the "ls" and "dir" commands
on nic, so if this is true for others as well, you may not be able to
see the files, but they are available as:
pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus:
- RELEASE-0.99.11 -- release notes
- README -- same as RELEASE..
- linux-0.99.11.tar.gz -- full sources
- linux-0.99.patch11.gz -- patches against pl10
I don't know if I'll actually have the energy to update the RELEASE
files every time, but that's the idea (with README being a copy of the
latest one). The README gives info on what changed, how to install it,
how to compile the kernel, and what to do with error dumps like "unable
to handler kernel paging request" and the like. Maybe it results in
better bug-reports. Maybe not.
Pl11 uses (as you all know by now) C++, so you'll need to have g++
installed. Also, there seems to be problems compiling the newer kernels
with gcc-2.3.3: there have been various reports that even pl10 (which
isn't C++) had problems which go away when compiled with gcc-2.4.3 or
newer.
As always, please send any bug-reports etc at least Cc'd to me: I'll be
wanting to know if things work or not.
Linus
<RELEASE-0.99.11>
Linux kernel release 0.99 patchlevel 11
These are the release notes for linux version 0.99.11. Read them
carefully, as they explain how to install the kernel, and what to do if
something goes wrong.
CHANGES since 0.99 patchlevel 10 and earlier:
- The keyboard is dynamically changeable (this is true of pl10 as
well), and you need to get the "keytables.tar.z" archive to set the
keyboard to suit your taske unless you want to live with the default
US keymaps.
Use the "loadkeys map/xxx.map" command to load the keyboard map: you
can edit the maps to suit yourself if you can't find a suitable one.
The syntax of the keyboard maps should be obvious after looking at
the examples.
- The memory manager has been cleaned up substantially, and mmap()
works for MAP_PRIVATE. MAP_SHARED is still not supported for
anything else than /dev/mem, but even so it actually is usable for a
lot of applications. The shared library routines have been rewritten
to use mmap() instead of the old hardcoded behaviour.
- The kernel is now compiled with C++ instead of plain C. Very few
actual C++ features are used, but even so C++ allows for more
type-checking and type-safe linkage.
- The filesystem routines have been cleaned up for multiple block
sizes. None of the filesystems use it yet, but people are working on
it.
- named pipes and normal pipes should hopefully have the right select()
semantics in the presense/absense of writers.
- QIC-02 tape driver by Hennus Bergman
- selection patches in the default kernel
- fixed a bug in the pty code which led to busy waiting in some
circumstances instead of sleeping.
- Compressed SLIP support (Charles Hedrick). See net/inet/CONFIG
INTERNAL kernel changes:
- the 'clear_bit()' function was changed to return the previous setting
of the bit instead of the old "error-code". This makes use of the
bit operations more logical.
- udelay() function for short delays (busy-waiting) added. Used
currently only by the QIC driver.
- fork() and sheduler changes to make task switches happen only from
kernel mode to kernel mode. Cleaner and more portable than the old
code which counted on being able to task-switch directly into user
mode.
- debugging malloc code.
INSTALLING the kernel:
- if you install by patching, you need a *clean* 0.99.10 source tree,
which presumably exists in /usr/src/linux. If so, to get the kernel
patched, just do a
cd /usr/src
patch -p0 < linux-0.99.patch11
and you should be ok. You may want to remove the backup files (xxx~
or xxx.orig), and make sure that there are no failed patches (xxx# or
xxx.rej).
- If you install the full sources, do a
cd /usr/src
tar xvf linux-0.99.11.tar
to get it all put in place.
- make sure your /usr/include/linux and /usr/include/asm directories
are just symlinks to the kernel sources:
cd /usr/include
rm -rf linux
rm -rf asm
ln -s /usr/src/linux/include/linux .
ln -s /usr/src/linux/include/asm .
- make sure you have no stale .o files and dependencies lying around:
cd /usr/src/linux
make mrproper
make dep
You should now have the sources correctly installed.
CONFIGURING the kernel:
- do a "make config" to configure the basic kernel. "make config"
needs bash to work: it will search for bash in $BASH, /bin/bash and
/bin/sh (in that order), so hopefully one of those is correct.
- edit net/inet/CONFIG to configure the networking parts of the kernel.
The comments should hopefully clarify it all.
- Check the top Makefile for further site-dependent configuration
(default SVGA mode etc).
COMPILING the kernel:
- make sure you have gcc-2.4.3 or newer available with g++. It seems
older gcc versions can have problems compiling linux 0.99.10 and
newer versions. If you upgrade, remember to get the new binutils
package too (for as/ld/nm and company)
- do a "make zImage" to create a compressed kernel image. If you want
to make a bootdisk (without root filesystem or lilo), insert a floppy
in your A: drive, and do a "make zdisk". It is also possible to do
"make zlilo" if you have lilo installed to suit the kernel makefiles,
but you may want to check your particular lilo setup first.
- keep a backup kernel handy in case something goes wrong.
- reboot with the new kernel.
IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG:
- if you have problems that seem to be due to kernel bugs, please mail
them to me (Linus.Torvalds@Helsinki.FI), and possibly to any other
relevant mailing-list or to the newsgroup. The mailing-lists are
useful especially for SCSI and NETworking problems, as I can't test
either of those personally anyway.
- In all bug-reports, *please* tell what kernel you are talking about,
how to duplicate the problem, and what your setup is (use your common
sense). If the problem is new, tell me so, and if the problem is
old, please try to tell me when you first noticed it.
- if the bug results in a message like
unable to handle kernel paging request at address C0000010
Oops: 0002
EIP: 0010:xxxxxxxx
eax: xxxxxxxx ebx: xxxxxxxx ecx: xxxxxxxx edx: xxxxxxxx
esi: xxxxxxxx edi: xxxxxxxx ebp: xxxxxxxx
ds: xxxx es: xxxx fs: xxxx gs: xxxx
Pid: xx, process nr: xx
xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx
or similar kernel debugging information on your screen or in your
system log, please duplicate it *exactly*. The dump may look
incomprehensible to you, but it does contain information that may
help debugging the problem. The text above the dump is also
important: it tells something about why the kernel dumped code (in
the above example it's due to a bad kernel pointer)
- in debugging dumps like the above, it helps enourmously if you can
look up what the EIP value means. The hex value as such doesn't help
me or anybody else very much: it will depend on your particular
kernel setup. What you should do is take the hex value from the EIP
line (ignore the "0010:"), and look it up in the kernel namelist to
see which kernel function contains the offending address.
To find out the kernel function name, you'll need to find the system
binary associated with the kernel that exhibited the symptom. In the
case of compressed kernels, this will be 'linux/tools/zSystem', while
uncompressed kernels use the file 'tools/system'. To extract the
namelist and match it against the EIP from the kernel crash, do:
nm tools/zSystem | sort | less
This will give you a list of kernel addresses sorted in ascending
order, from which it is simple to find the function that contains the
offending address. Note that the address given by the kernel
debugging messages will not necessarily match exactly with the
function addresses (in fact, that is very unlikely), so you can't
just 'grep' the list: the list will, however, give you the starting
point of each kernel function, so by looking for the function that
has a starting address lower than the one you are searching for but
is followed by a function with a higher address you will find the one
you want. In fact, it may be a good idea to include a bit of
"context" in your problem report, giving a few lines around the
interesting one.
If you for some reason cannot do the above (you have a pre-compiled
kernel image or similar), telling me as much about your setup as
possible will help.
-----
From: torvalds@cc.helsinki.fi (Linus Torvalds)
Subject: ALPHA-pl11 available on nic: C++ support
Date: Sun, 4 Jul 93 00:03:03 GMT
For those brave souls that enjoy testing new releases, there is an
ALPHA-release of the 0.99.11 version available on nic.funet.fi in the
usual place (pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus). This has a few changes from
the last one, the most notable being that it is compiled using C++, as
there was some interest in that on the c.o.l newsgroup. Note that very
few C++ features are actually used: the major changes were some minor
syntactic editing and the addition of 'extern "C"' to functions called
from assembly code. The C++ changes are not the same as those done by
Tristan (although you should thank him for getting it rolling), as I
wanted to resolve the differences between C and C++ a bit differently.
The C++ changes shouldn't actually change the way the kernel works, and
it's mainly used currently to do stricter pointer checking. The name
mangling probably breaks the kmem based 'ps' once again.. Actual code
changes for this test-version:
- I added the patches by Charles Hedrick for SLIP: this actually means
that only CSLIP is available for now, so.. The net code is still not
ready: Fred is working on it, so this is just an interim version when
it comes to networking (there are some other minor patches in there as
well).
- The mm has been cleaned up since pl10, and mmap() actually works for
most things, while malloc() will return NULL when the kernel thinks
there isn't enough memory. Similarly, the buffer cache code should
now support different block sizes (although this is still in the
"early alpha" stage. Most of the changes by Eric Youngdale, with mm
cleanups by me.
- A problem with the dynamic inode code (insufficient inode
invalidation) that could result in fs corruption under some
circumstances is fixed.
People who have written drivers etc should probably check out the
changes I did due to the stricter C++ pointer checking.
Linus
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I've finally released an official version of linux-0.99 patchlevel 10:
there have been various alpha versions floating around which differ in
details (notably networking code), which shouldn't be used any more.
The new linux version is available only as full source code: the diffs
would have been too big to be useful. You can find linux-0.99.10.tar.z
(along with keytables.tar.z) on nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus
and probably on tsx-11 and other linux archives within a day or two (so
check there first if you are in the states).
Linux-0.99 pl10 has a number of new features and changes in interface.
The most notable of these are:
- the networking code is reorganized (generally called "net-2",
although unrelated to the BSD release). The new code implements a
lot of standard features lacking in net-1, and also changes the user
interface to be closer to the BSD standards. Notably, the old
configuration binaries won't work, so to get the new networking to
work you'll have to get the net-2 binaries as well. The networking
binaries are available on tsx-11.mit.edu (and mirrors) under the
directory pub/linux/packages/net/net-2 (and the setup syntax has
changed somewhat..)
The networking code has been mainly organized and rewritten by Fred
van Kempen, with drivers by Donald Becker.
- serial line setup has been changed: linux 0.99 pl10 does *not* try to
autodetect serial ports very agressively. If you have other serial
ports than the standard com1/com2, or nonstandard IRQ etc values,
this means that it's less likely to work without any help. The
solution is not to recompile the kernel - you should get the
"setserial" program available from tsx-11.mit.edu in the directory
pub/linux/sources/sbin/setserial-2.01.tar.z that allows you to
dynamically configure your serial ports to suit your setup.
The main organizer behind the serial line changes is tytso (Theodore
Ts'o).
- Keyboard setup has changed: it is no longer hardcoded at compile
time, but instead you can use the new "loadkeys" program to load in a
new keyboard map on the fly. The default keyboard map is the normal
US keyboard (yes, I should have used the Finnish one by default, but
after thinking of all the problems that would have resulted in I
forgot about that idea). The loadkeys code can be found in the
"keytables.tar.z" archive, which also contains keymaps for most
normal keyboard types. To create a custom keyboard table is very
easy - just take a 5 minute look at the existing map files (they
resemble the ones used by xmodmap, so if you are familiar with
those..)
The loadable keymaps were mostly implemented by Risto Kankkunen.
There are a lot of other internal kernel changes, but they should be
mostly transparent, and noticeable only indirectly due to new features
or (hopefully) better/faster/whatever operation. These include:
- the SysV IPC patches are in by default: Krishna Balasubramanian.
If you need these, you know what it's about (notably, dosemu 0.49
wants them).
- inode handling is updated: inodes and files are now dynamically
allocated within the kernel, and use a hash table for faster lookup
(along with a NFU algorithm for the inode cache). Steven Tweedie.
- Updated FPU emulation: mostly exception handling changes, making the
emulator handle most exceptions the same way a 486 does. The
emulator is written by Bill Metzenthen.
- a few ext2-fs updates by Remy Card and Steven Tweedie.
- support for the 'fsync()' function (Steven Tweedie)
- various (minor) SCSI patches to catch some error conditions, add
support for VLB adaptec controllers without DMA and so on (different
people).
- other changes - I forget.
In addition to patches sent in by others, I've naturally made my own
changes (often *to* the patches sent in by others :-). Among other
things, the pl10 buffer cache code now also tries to share pages with
executables, resulting in better cacheing especially of binaries (giving
noticeable improvements in kernel recompilation speed on some machines).
Also, I've changed a lot of low-level things around to help the iBCS2
project: this includes things like internal segment handling and the
signal stack (which now looks the same as on SysV i386 unixes). All in
all, pl10 has a disturbing amount of new code, but will hopefully work
well despite (due to?) the number of changes.
The new networking code in particular will change the network setup a
lot - it now looks more standard, but if you were used to the old way of
doing things.. On the other hand, most people actively using the
networking features have hopefully gotten warnings about this on the NET
channel for the last few weeks. Also, the networking code still isn't
perfect: Fred is still working on it, but it seems to have reached a
reasonably stable platform on which it will be easier to build. Look
out for the new-and-improved networking manual, hopefully out soon(?).
Standard request: please try it all out, give it a real shakedown, and
send comments/bug-reports to the appropriate place (I'm always
appropriate, but you may want to send the report to the mailing lists
and/or the newsgroup as well). I apologize for the lateness of the
release (forcing hlu to make interim gcc releases that relied on
nonstandard kernels etc), and the changes are somewhat bigger than I'd
prefer, so the more testerts that try it out, the faster we can try to
fix any possible problems. The new kernel has gone through various
stages of ALPHA-diffs and some late ALPHA-pl10's, so there shouldn't be
any major surprises, but alpha releases tend not to get even close to
the coverage a real release gets...
Linus
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|
The latest kernel release is 0.99.9, and can be found on nic.funet.fi:
pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus, both as patches relative to pl8 and as full
sources. The only major new feature is that the ST-0x driver has
finally been updated to the scatter-gather code: ST-0x users should with
luck get about 5 times the performance on disk-operations.. Seagate
code written by Drew Eckhardt.
0.99.9 also fixes:
- the FPU-emulator should now handle all rounding-modes correctly, and
pass all the paranoia package tests. Patches by Bill Metzenthen.
- bootup enhancements by Chrisoph Niemann (but the SVGA mode numbers
have changed, so you may have to edit your lilo configuration file
and/or the main Makefile to get the mode you normally want)
- ext2fs updated to the very latest release. Code by Remy Card and
Stephen Tweedie.
- various minor patches, some of them cosmetic, some of them fixes to
smaller bugs.. Thanks to everybody who sent them in (even though not
all made it)
It might be a good idea to test it all out,
Linus
|
|
Yet another kernel release is now available on nic.funet.fi in the usual
place (pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus for those of you that have already
forgotten), and will probably show up on the other ftp-sites within a
day or two. There are two new files:
linux-0.99.8.tar.z - the full gzipped and tarred source-tree of the
linux kernel.
linux-0.99.patch8.z - unified diffs against the last official release
(0.99pl7).
There is no SLIP or new networking routines in this kernel despite the
rumors that have been flying around - the main changes to 0.99.7 are
(some of them were in 0.99pl7A as well):
- the signal handling code has been extensively reworked, and should be
POSIX as well as clean.
- dosfs is upgraded to version 12 (Werner Almesberger)
- xiafs is upgraded to the latest version (Qi Xia)
- ext2fs is upgraded to the latest version (Remy Card/Stephen Tweedie)
- FPU-emulation patches for v86 mode and precision rounding (Bill
Metzenthen)
- SCSI patches by various people (Eric Youngdale & co)
- XT harddisk support (Pat Mackinlay)
- new trial code to try to handle 387 lockups on some systems more
gracefully.
- keyboard, lp and serial driver fixes
- various minor changes (mounting root read-only, bootup messages
cleaned up etc)
As always, comments/bugs etc are encouraged,
Linus
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|
I don't generally announce ALPHA-diffs to quite this large an audience,
but I'll be partying^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hunavailable for the rest of the
week, and it's unlikely that I will be able to check mails or the
newsgroups until the start of April. As a result, I'm putting up my
latest kernel version for ftp as it fixes some things in 0.99.7.
The ALPHA-diffs can be found on nic.funet.fi: in the directory
pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus. If you dislike patching, you can get the
full sources in "linux-0.99.7A.tar.z", or just get the diff file
"ALPHA-diff.z".
Changes in this release:
- the new kernel now detects the lock-up condition at startup if you
have a faulty 386/387 coupling, and will use software floating point
in that case.
- the Xia filesystem is updated to the latest version
- the DOS filesystem is updated to the latest version
- the XT disk driver is included: I haven't been able to test it, but
at least it won't bother anybody if you don't configure it in..
- the latest serial diffs are in
- minor ultrastor fixes
- some changes to the keyboard and line printer drivers: I hope the
keyboard lockups that some people have reported would be gone with
this release.
- some fixes to arp.c
I'll be interested in success/failure reports, although I won't be able
to answer them for some time (and I might miss some of the posts on
c.o.l).
Linus
|
|
It has been two weeks since the last release, so it's high time you
should once more enjoy the pleasures of patching up your kernel to a
higher version number if you are into those kinds of perversions. Linux
0.99pl7 is available as both full source and diffs against pl6 on
nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus, and it will probably show up on
the other major sites within days.
As of pl7, I'm trying out a new format: both the full distribution and
the diffs are now compressed with gzip as it is now available at most
machines. Also, the diffs are no longer context diffs: they use the
smaller unified diff format. At least the stock SunOS 'patch' binary
seems not to understand them at all, but GNU patch has no problems, and
unified diffs are a bit smaller (not that it matters much after gzip has
done its deed on them).
As to the changes in pl7: they are many and varied, and hopefully all to
the better (-"Dream on Linus" -"Shut up"). Short list follows, hope I
haven't forgotten anything major.
- ext2fs is in: note that this is version 0.2c and that if you are
currently using an older version there are some changes. Small
filesystems (< 256MB) should reportedly be automatically converted,
bigger filesystems need some assistance. Ext2fs written by Remy Card.
- xiafs is also in: again, the final version uses a slightly different
layout to support exact file block counts, so if you use the xiafs,
you should make sure you have the latest fs-tools. Xiafs written by
Frank Xia.
- updated Ultrastor SCSI driver with scatter/gather by Scott Taylor.
It should be much faster, as well as support the Ultrastor-34F.
- major changes in the memory manager. Yours truly got carried away,
and finally cleaned up the mm layer due to pmacdona wanting mmap() on
/dev/zero. This means that the IPC patches won't go in, and need
updating. Krishna?
- more big changes: I rewrote most of the VFS filename-handling.
Filenames are copied into kernel space before being used, which
cleaned things up somewhat, as well as simplifying some race-
condition handling. As a result, I was also able to easily expand
the minix fs to cover the "linux" fs that some people have been using
(same layout, but with 30-character names).
- updated the printer driver: Nigel Gamble. It is now able to use
interrupts, although the default behaviour is still to poll.
- serial driver updates by tytso (but no SLIP yet)
- various minor patches for POSIX compliace: Bruce Evans, Rick Sladkey
and me.
- other minor patches all over the place: scsi, tcpip etc.
All in all, the patches are almost half a megabyte even as unified
diffs: getting the full sources might be easier than patching it all up.
As always, some of the patches are actually tested by me, some aren't
(and just because I wrote some of them doesn't mean I actually *tested*
them: I have no idea if mmap() works on /dev/zero, although it should).
I have neither a printer nor an Ultrastor controller, and I haven't got
the diskspace to test out the new filesystems, so I can only hope they
work "as advertized". If you have problems, I want to hear about them,
so keep the reports coming, and try to pinpoint the problem as well as
you can ("when I do *this* it happens every time..").
Linus
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I'm starting soon to run out of patchlevel numbers for 0.99, but I made
a new release anyway (and long-time linux hackers remember my less than
completely logical numbering: when I run out of numbers I'll start using
alphabetical characters and other fun characters to indicate new
versions :-)
0.99pl6 is mainly a syncronization release: it fixes a few bugs and
changes the behaviour of 'vhangup()' to be more standard. The vhangup()
changes will break some init/login stuff that depended on the earlier
incorrect behaviour - not everybody may want to use pl6 until you are
sure your init/login will work happily with it. Better do these things
before 1.0 than to break it later.
Patchlevel 6 also changes the vfs functions for special devices as well
as adding a 'fsync' field to the inode-operations structure. Thus
ext2fs and xfs need updating. Remy and Xia? The special file and fifo
handling code is no longer supposed to be in the fs-dependent layer, but
is handled by the vfs routines, as it's the same for all "normal"
filesystems.
Ok, here are the actual changes/features of pl6:
- the kernel can be loaded in gzipped format and de-compressed at
startup beyond the 1MB mark. Good for bootable rootdisks. Patches
mainly by Hannu Savolainen.
- I finally enabled NMI's everywhere (except at the bootup sequence),
so if you have memory errors, they will hopefully now result in
kernel messages ("NMI received..")
- the device registration code for special devices. Special files are
now registered with a special "register_[chr|blk]dev()" function.
- consolidated fifo/special dev handling
- vhangup patches. Note that these may break init/login badly, at
least if you are using poeigl-1.7. Be careful that you don't get
totally locked out of your machine.
- the procfs NULL-dereferencing bugfix (michaelkjohnson)
- literal next character handling (very losely based on a patch I
received: I essentially rewrote it with final fixes by jrs).
- fpu-emu bugfixes by Bill Metzenthen - fixes the "internal error 112"
bug as well as a sign bug with zero.
- fdomain driver fixes
- various other minor fixes (wrongly replying to bad ip messages etc)
I'm still not sure about the 387 error detection code: I have had a
couple of messages that would suggest that some early clone 387's have
problems with math exceptions in protected mode. With the new (as of
99pl5) test at startup this can lead to problems at boot-time. Please
mail me directly if you seem to have problems with this (it should be
obvious in pl6 due to debugging messages at startup).
Linus
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"He's done it yet again - doesn't he ever rest?"
- anonymous linux kernel hacker
Only complete newbies don't know what this is all about, but I'd better
tell you anyway: patchlevel 5 of the 0.99 kernel is now available on
nic.funet.fi (pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus) as both context diffs against
pl4 and complete source code. I'm not even going to speculate on 1.0
right now.
The pl5 diffs are about 90kB compressed: the major changes are to the
tcp/ip code and the serial driver, while there are various minor fixes
strewn around the system:
- serial lines/tty changes (tytso & Fred v Kempen)
- NFS bugfixes (Rick Sladkey)
- tcp/ip (Ross Biro)
- coprocessor handling changes (me)
- harddisk driver error handling (Mika Liljeberg)
- various minor patches (me and others)
Serial lines now implement non-blocking opens correctly and support
dial-out lines (same minor, major==5). I changed the default startup
mode to be CLOCAL so that people won't get confused by the modem line
code when not using dial-in.
Another interesting change is the 387 error-coupling tests at bootup:
the code to check if the intel-recommended exception 16 error reporting
is present is "non-obvious". If you have had problems with coprocessor
error handling, or have a non-intel coprocessor, I'd suggest you test
this out: I'd like to hear about problems/successes.
Linus
PS. If you tested out the latest ALPHA-diffs (the ones that already
changed the kernel version to pl5), the changes to the final pl5 were
only cosmetic.
|
|
In article <1993Jan21.181502.23485@miles.com> dennisf@miles.com (Dennis Flaherty) writes:
>
>Here's another clue. Try this: when your system freezes, running X, try
>MOVING THE MOUSE. It's weird!! But moving the mouse actually makes the
>system run! Stop moving the mouse, and the system freezes again. And
>this only happens with 0.99.3, not 0.99.2.
Get pl4, and it should be gone. There was a bug in the handling of
uninitialized interrupts in pl3, where they could result in either the
wrong interrupt mask being loaded leading to interrupt lock-out or (in
some cases) bit corruption at the user level. The symptoms are exactly
as you describe: a good interrupt that didn't happen to be locked out
will correct the interrupt mask, and the system goes on (it can be
moving the mouse, but it might also be a keyboard event etc).
Linus
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|
Still no 1.0 - I have had a couple of reports of problems, so I'll make
yet another 0.99 release. The diffs (against 0.99.2) and complete
source can be found at nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus as usual,
and will probably show up at the other sites pretty soon.
0.99.3 contains no real new features, but the diffs are pretty big
anyway (100kB+ compressed): various things have moved around a bit and
there are a lot of minor changes. The changes include (but are not
limited to):
- the math emulator code now also understands the unofficial codes (in
case somebody followed the ML math emulator thread). I'd be
interested to hear whether ML now works with the emulator.
- various SCSI driver changes
- some re-organization of the tty open/close code to remove a few race
conditions.
- interrupt handling rewrites (two-level interrupt code cleanups)
- the serial drivers are tytso's alpha-drivers: they aren't quite
completed, but as they need the interrupt handling patches to get
ready, this is probably the least traumatic way of doing it.
- some more minor keyboard driver changes (mostly taking advantage of
the two-level interrupts)
+ a lot of other minor changes. I once more hope people will try it
out, and report any problems or successes to me.
Known problems:
- there seems to be something weird going on in the ST-0x driver with
some scsi disks.
- tcp/ip is reportedly still not quite stable, and I can't even test it
out.
NOTE! The DMA functions have changed for the high DMA channels - all DMA
functions now take their arguments as the number of bytes instead of the
old way of using bytes for ch 0-3 and words for ch 5-7. This might lead
to problems with the SoundBlaster driver, which may need editing.
Linus
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Yes, as you've probably noticed, it's now 1993 and I still haven't
released 1.0. Sorry about that, and I have only another patchlevel to
offer. The new kernel should mainly fix some of the keyboard problems
people have experienced, but does contain some other minor fixes.
Linux 0.99.2 is available now at nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus
as both sources and diffs against 0.99.1 the diffs are essentially the
same as the second alpha-diffs I released for limited testing, with only
minor fixes to fs/exec.c and fs/open.c.
Please try out 0.99.2: the more feedback (hopefully positive) I get on
it, the faster 1.0 will be out.
Changes from pl1 are mainly:
- pretty much rewritten low-level keyboard handling IO - this time
actually trying to do it by the book. It now handles resend requests
from the keyboard etc.
- you can run executables from filesystems without bmap support. This
mainly means NFS and msdos. Note that while it's possible, it's
slower and less memory-efficient than using a "normal" linux
filesystem, and should generally be avoided.
- /proc filesystem changes: /proc/kmsg can be used to log the kernel
messages under X11 (instead of using the older system call to do the
same), and there are changes to the statistics routines (WCHAN).
+ various minor fixes (non-existent devices are handled better, some
changes to socket bind behaviour etc).
Linus
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Linux-0.99.1 is now available on nic.funet.fi, and will probably show up
on the other linux ftp sites within days, unless everybody has gone off
for the holidays. The directory is /pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus, and it's
available both as a patch against 0.99 and as complete source. The
patch is pretty clean, although most people probably have changed 0.99
slightly to get rid of the setup and/or inode.c problems, so if you
have, you'll have to revert or patch by hand.
Patch 1 addresses the following problems:
- configuration. Hope there are no silly problems left..
- inode.c: initialization changes (the missing NULL and some other
minor fixes).
- some SCSI tape driver patches (Kai M{kisara)
- tcp/ip patches (Ross Biro, some code by me)
- keyboard patches (mainly changed initialization - hope the keyboard
lockups are gone).
- completed /proc-fs: it should now contain all info needed by 'ps'
(Micheal K Johnson).
- various minor fixes (the minix-fs link overflow checking etc)
Patch1 also contains support for extended VC switching - this is for the
upcoming X11 that understands VC's. One result of this is that console
redirection now redirects *only* messages actually sent to /dev/console
(aka /dev/tty0), not just to any foreground VC. Wait for Xfree-1.2 to
be able to switch VC's while under X (yes, including several X-sessions
active at the same time..).
I hope there are still people out there that aren't too busy stuffing
themself with turkey to try out a new kernel release. There is just
over a week left of this year, and I need feedback in order to be able
to release 1.0.
Linus
PS. Thanks to everybody who has sent me Christmas/New Year/Birthday
cards. Some contained money, some didn't, and I enjoyed them all.
Thanks.
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Linux version 0.99 is now available at nic.funet.fi, in the directory
pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus as both full source and patches against
0.98.6. It will probably show up on the other major sites soon.
NOTE!! The context diffs aren't very good. The makefiles have changed,
and due to the new setup they changed radically enough that I couldn't
edit away the dependancy changes like I usually do. This means that the
diffs are unlikely to patch cleanly, and I'd suggest people get the full
source unless you feel comfortable about patching by hand. Also, if you
get the full source, I'd suggest you remove (or move elsewhere) all of
the old kernel to make sure you don't have any dead files from older
versions lying around.
0.99 has no major new features: the NFS client code is now in the
standard distribution, and the kernel configuration has changed, but
most of the rest of the changes are fixes - especially the tcp code
should now be pretty stable (knock wood).
Changes:
- NFS is in. As are some stubs for the soud drivers, although it's only
stubs right now.
- various fixes around the place: the serial problems are hopefully
gone, and there are patches to both TCP/IP and SCSI to make them more
stable.
- Minor fixes: the keyboard buglet introduced in 0.98pl6 should be
gone, and some other bugs are also corrected. The optimized
read-ahead code in the filesystems (and the raw device read code) was
too complicated and seemed to have problems with bad blocks, so I
rewrote it, and it should hopefully work correctly now (this may have
been the reason "mkfs -c" didn't work in all cases). Thanks for some
good bug-reports I've gotten: I've tried to correct all the problems
I got reports on.
- The kernel configuration has been re-thought: I decided to take
advantage of the possibilities offered by GNU make etc. This means
that you no longer can compile the kernel using any other make, but
there probably aren't many (if any) people doing that anyway. This
way I got rid of the extremely ugly SCSI setup, so it was probably
worth it.
To configure the kernel for your setup, do a
make config
and answer the yes/no questions. After that, do a
make dep
to make the dependencies match your setup. After that you should still
go edit the top-level Makefile for some of the configuration information
as before, but the remaining config things are pretty simple. Then you
can make the kernel with a simple "make Image".
The new configuration utility (essentially a stupid shell script coupled
with some smarts in the Makefiles) tries to minimize compilations: if
you disable the SCSI code the scsi drivers won't even be compiled, much
less linked in. This should be a win on slower machines.
NOTE!!! Use LILO-0.7 to load the 0.98pl5 and newer kernels: any older
version of lilo is liable to result in weird problems.
Linus
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You all know what the above subject-line means by now...
Currently only the full sources to 0.98pl6 are available (at
nic.funet.fi in the directory pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus), but I'll
probably make context-diffs later today. It depends a bit on the size
of the diffs: the changes in pl6 aren't very suitable for diffing
(renaming of some SCSI files etc).
Anyway, 0.98pl6 is hopefully the last release before 0.99: there are a
few known problems left in this release. Most notable is the serial
code: it works for most people, but others still have problems with it.
I hope this will get fixed within a week (tytso is working on it). It
also seems as if the PS/2 mouse code has some problems.
pl6 contains these fixes:
- all the tcp/ip patches I've received (and I fixed one bug that
gcc-2.3 seems to have found).
- math-emu patch for the problem that resulted in FPU errors with some
operations.
- I fixed gcc-2.3 warnings as well as most of the old warnings. You
shouldn't get more than one or two warnings when recompiling the
whole kernel.
- /proc filesystem extensions. Based on ideas (and some code) by
Darren Senn, but mostly written by yours truly. More about that
later.
- some tty_io fixes (there was a bug in the /dev/console handling when
you changed VC's while using the general console device).
- re-organization of the keyboard-driver internal data-structures. The
changes are mostly preliminary: they change the keyboard flags to be
more easily adaptive to a reprogrammable keyboard driver. No actual
new features yet.
- new SCSI drivers: reportedly much faster than the old ones (but not
all drivers take advantage of it yet..)
- various other fixes: pty's etc have minor changes.
I hope to make 0.99 in a week or so, and 1.0 after that has been tested
some. I hope people will test out pl6 - 0.99 won't be much different,
and if you don't test pl6, any bugs relating to your particular hardware
may not be found in time for 0.99...
Linus
===== /proc filesystem comments, ignore if not interested =====
If people want to test out the new /proc filesystem features, please do
# mount -t proc /proc /proc
(or add the line "/proc /proc proc defaults 0 0" to your /etc/mtab). You
obviously need a /proc subdirectory for the above.
After mounting the proc fs, your /proc should look something like this:
# ls -l /proc
....
dr-xr-xr-x 4 root root 0 Dec 2 22:55 936
dr-xr-xr-x 4 root root 0 Dec 2 22:55 983
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 Dec 2 22:55 loadavg
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 Dec 2 22:55 meminfo
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 Dec 2 22:55 uptime
The numeric entries correspond with the pid's of the running procedures,
while the alphabetic entries are vaious general info-files (don't be
fooled by the zero length).
# cat /proc/meminfo
total: used: free: shared: buffers:
Mem: 15831040 15601664 229376 3952640 8904704
Swap: 5521408 0 5521408
# cat /proc/loadavg
0.01 0.02 0.00
# cat /proc/uptime
12981
The info should be pretty self-evident (uptime is in seconds, and yes, I
reboot pretty often).
For each <pid> in the system, the per-process directory looks like this:
# ls -l /proc/50/
total 3
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 Dec 2 23:00 cmdline
lrwx------ 1 root root 3 Dec 2 23:00 cwd -> ---
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 Dec 2 23:00 environ
lrwx------ 1 root root 3 Dec 2 23:00 exe -> ---
dr-x------ 2 root root 0 Dec 2 23:00 fd
dr-x------ 2 root root 0 Dec 2 23:00 lib
crw------- 1 root root 1, 1 Dec 2 23:00 mem
lrwx------ 1 root root 3 Dec 2 23:00 root -> ---
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 Dec 2 23:00 stat
The most interesting entries are probably the new ones: cmdline, environ
and stat. They give the process command-line, environment and some
statistics respectively. The file protections will probably have to be
changed.
# cat /proc/50/cmdline | tr '\000' ' ' && echo
X :0 -pn
# cat /proc/50/environ | tr '\000' ' ' && echo
SHELL=/bin/sh SHLVL=2 BASH=/bin/sh MAIL=/var/spool/mail/root
HOME=/usr/root PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/etc:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin/X11
LOGNAME=root LESS=-MM TERM=console ignoreeof=10 HOSTTYPE=i386 DISPLAY=:0
_=/usr/bin/X11/xinit
The 'tr' and 'echo' commands are there to make it look a bit nicer: the
command line arguments and environment variables are separated by '\0'
characters and aren't terminated by a newline. Note that the /proc
filesystem doesn't try to fetch command line data that is swapped out,
so when you are swapping, one or both of the above may be empty or
truncated. Also, the code I wrote to fetch the above may nor be
complete yet, and doesn't seem to be able to find all of the cmdline all
of the time..
Finally there is the (not completely implemented) process status file:
# cat /proc/50/stat
50 (X) R 49 50 10 1
This currently gives the pid, short name ("X", max 8 chars, but you get
it even when the process is swapped out), the state (R for running etc),
ppid (49), pgrp (50), session (10) and controlling terminal (1 -
/dev/tty1). The status file will have to be extended to tell you more
about the process, but that should be easy now that the general code is
there..
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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).
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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
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Ok, I already sent out an announcement last night, but due to the time
(6AM over here) I wasn't really in a mood to write a real annoucement.
Here it is.
linux-0.98.3 is available by anonymous ftp at least on nic.funet.fi:
pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus, both as context diffs against 0.98.2 and the
pre-version of 0.98.3 and as complete source. The complete source
package was done by directly applying the diffs - this means that the
Makefile dependancies are probably not 100% up-to-date as I remove those
from the diffs. It shouldn't be any problem, and you can always do a
"make dep ; make clean" before actually compiling the kernel.
0.98 pl3 fixes several bugs, and should remove all known NULL-pointer
problems that made 0.98.2 unusable for most people. In addition to the
NULL pointer fixes, the following things have changed:
- removed most of the cli-sti pairs in the filesystem code by rewriting
the locking routines to use a different algorithm, possible due to
the rewritten wait-queue code that I did back in 0.96c or so.
Interrupt latency should be better on slow machines, but I don't know
if it's noticeable.
- Minor 387-emulation fixes by Bill Metzenthen - only noticeable under
special conditions.
- Corrected various error-returns in the fs (thanks to Bruce Evans for
running some error diagnostics). Error messages when opening (and
renaming etc) files that had a non-directory in the path were wrong,
and should be ok now (ie giving ENOTDIR instead of EACCESS or ENOENT).
Some other problems reported by Bruce fixed.
- Changed the interface for some fs-related functions due to cleaning
up super-block handling. Most noticeably, iget() and related
functions no longer specify the inode with a device and inode number,
but instead with a super-block pointer and inode number. This is
more logical, and should make unnamed devices (ie internal
filesystems like nfs and /proc) cleaner. Also note that the calling
sequence for sb->s_op->put_inode() also has changed since 0.98. This
is of interest only if you are writing filesystem drivers..
- ASK_SVGA was broken in 0.98.2 - it should be ok now.
Also, various minor fixes as usual. No new features, but I hope 0.98.3
will be a lot less bug-prone due to the changes since 0.98.1. Some
minor tcp/ip corrections (but most of them were in the pre-release), and
I removed a race-condition in the tty-handling code.
Note that people who use math without a co-processor should certainly
upgrade to 0.98.3: the new emulator is much better than my original one
both in speed and accuracy/exception handling. x11perf is very much
bearable now even without a 387, and things like ray-tracing etc
shouldn't be a problem any more. It's slower than hardware fp, of
course, but at least it works.
The new emulator also means there is no reason for a separate soft-float
library, so I'd assume that will be gone in the next gcc release for
linux.
As usual, a new kernel version probably means you'll have to recompile
'ps' and friends. But at least the same 'ps' sources that worked for
0.97.6 should still work.
Linus
-----
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Torvalds)
Subject: 0.98.3 finally available
Date: 27 Oct 1992 04:01:01 GMT
0.98.3 is available at nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus as diffs
against 0.98.2 (linux-0.98.patch3.Z) and against the pre-release that
was announced on the mailing-lists (pre-final.diff.Z). I haven't
uploaded the complete sources yet, so diffs are all there is: I'll
upload the full sources once I've gotten some more sleep.
0.98.3 corrects a lot of NULL-pointer bugs, as well as some other
problems (notably serial lines). Hope this release will be stable,
Linus
-----
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Torvalds)
Subject: 0.98.3 is late ...
Date: 26 Oct 1992 05:07:26 GMT
... as you probably all have noticed. I've been up all night writing
this report for the "CS Course from Hell" (*), and haven't had time to
play with linux. I'll get it done tonight if I can keep awake that
long.
In case anybody still wonders, 0.98.3 mainly fixes the NULL pointer and
most of the serial line problems. I also started to remove some of the
more unnecessary cli-sti pairs (where races could be avoided by doing it
some other way), so it's possible interrupt latency is better, but I
doubt it's noticeable.
Linus
(*) Well, they call it "ATK-suunnittelun laboratorioty|", but they
aren't fooling anybody.
-----
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Torvalds)
Subject: Re: ANNOUNCE: 0.98.pl2 is out
Date: 18 Oct 1992 22:42:02 GMT
In article <1992Oct18.144546.28249@klaava.Helsinki.FI> I wrote:
> [ deleted ]
>
> - various minor mm fixes by me: trapping kernel NULL dereferences,
...
Oh, boy. Talk about a feature that proved itself. I have never gotten
so many bug-reports so fast: it seems there were quite a few
NULL-pointer problems in the code I hadn't been able to test. Thus
0.98.2 isn't actually very useable unless you have a system very close
to my setup - I don't recommend the faint-of-hearted to try it out.
I guess I should be happy the new feature found problems in the kernel
sources, but I could well have lived with a couple less problems. Main
problem areas seem to be:
- the vhangup() system call - used by newer login-binaries, and
resulting in login getting killed.
- some scsi driver problems (but they should be fixed by the patch eric
already sent out)
- tcp/ip problems - at least three different places where NULL gets
dereferenced (and one is particularly ugly: it does test for NULL,
but does so *after* dereferencing it...)
The vhangup() problem was easy to correct (and excusable: it broke at
least partly due to the new dynamic tty-routines). I'll make some
preliminary testing-patches available that fix that problem, and
includes the scsi fixes.
But the tcp/ip code is a bit worse: I fixed two of the known problems,
but I'd rather use patches from the persons who wrote the code
originally, as there are some other problems in there.. And I can't be
sure I find them all anyway, as I'll never see the problems first-hand.
Just wanted to warn everybody about this aspect of pl2 - the
NULL-pointer finding code is working a bit too well for my taste. I had
hoped there wouldn't be quite this many NULL pointer problems, but at
least they'll be found this way.
Linus
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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
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nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus contains the first patch to
0.98 (along with a bootimage and the full source for those that don't
like to patch).
Patch1 to 0.98 mainly corrects some driver problems: it contains the
added "inb_p(HD_STATUS)" for hd.c, as well as a changed mouse driver
setup (hope it works - I couldn't test it..). There are also some SCSI
driver patches: the seagate driver uses irqaction() to get irq's, and
the aha1542 driver has the speedup patches.
The bootimage should be compiled without the auto-SVGA mode, so people
who had problems with linux automatically using a SVGA mode should be ok
in this release.
Linus
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Sorry for being late - I can't even show any great new features in 0.98,
but at least it's out now, and available at the normal place (ie at
nic.funet.fi, pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus). So far there is only a
full-source version available, although I'll probably make it available
as a patch too tomorrow or so (but the patch won't contain the tcp/ip
stuff).
0.98 is essentially the same as 0.97.pl6 - the changes are mostly:
- tcp/ip (0.8.1) is in. It's not compiled into the standard bootimage,
and you'd better be on the tcpip mailing-list to use it, but it's
there. I've been unable to test it further than just watch it
compile...
- extfs patch to correct the problem with big directories with holes.
- mouse patches (ie improved detection-routines)
- minor scsi patches (ultrastor driver change)
- swiss keyboard
- some serial driver patches
- the 32mb patches are in, so if you aren't using a DMA-SCSI driver,
and have more than 16MB physical memory, you can get it recognized.
- edited hd.c
- corrected core-dumping routines
I didn't get my mm patches working yet, so they'll have to wait. The
above are almost 100% by others - I have edited some of the patches, but
there is nothing major new by me. Most of it is minor bug-fixes, and
the only thing that might be a bit of a problem are the hd.c changes:
but I hope they'll solve more problems than they cause. Knock wood.
At nic.funet.fi you can currently find (a) the full sources (b) a
bootimage (US keyboard, floppy root, no tcp/ip) and (c) the protocols.h
file needed for compiling the tcp/ip directory (which should go into
/usr/include/netinet/). I hope people try it out, and that there are no
new problems with this release.
Linus
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You all know what the subject line means by now: in case you want to
track my kernel versions, the weekly patch is available at nic.funet.fi,
pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus.
This patch does not contain any major bug-fixes: it corrects named pipes
that broke with pl5, and has some minor changes in the IO-instructions
and the hd-driver, but those shouldn't matter for most of you.
It does contain all the scsi-patches that I've gotten so far, so if the
bootup sequence died on you in the scsi code, pl6 should correct this.
The major part of the patch is tytso's serial line changes, making the
tty structures dynamic. No more NR_PTY's - the number of pty's is now
bounded only by the minor number setup (max 64 pty's) or the amount of
memory available (opening a pty requires a page of memory for tty
queues). Similarly for serial lines.
The above just means that while pl6 can be useful, the changes to pl5
aren't big enough to worry about. Most people don't use named pipes, it
seems, and the other changes are either cosmetic or hardware-dependent.
I still hope people upgrade, if only so that I can get new bug-reports.
I had hoped to release 0.98 this weekend, but studies and the scsi/hd
problems put an end to that. 0.98 should be out next weekend or so.
Expect the tcp/ip subdirectory and possibly some mm changes.
Linus
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The subject says it all: the newest patches have been uploaded to
nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus. Patchlevel 5 is available both
as complete source (linux-0.97.5.tar.Z) or as a biggish patch against
patchlevel 4 (linux-0.97.patch5.Z).
Patch 5 fixes the extended filesystem problems (thanks to Remy Card), as
well as including many smaller fixes (some more fs cleanups, the CDROM
patches and several other minor changes). Pl5 finally removes even the
last few header-files that were incompatible with the normal headers, so
the "-nostdinc -I$(KERNELHDRS)" stuff is gone.
Patch 5 should also fix the problems with iopl() that resulted in the
X8514-server having problems with 0.97.pl2 and above.
In case people are wondering, my schedule for 1.0 looks something like
this:
- 0.98 out in about a week: this is essentially 0.97.5 + the tcp/ip
directory, as well as any fixes that may come up. I'll try to get
the loadable driver interface into it too.
- 0.99 out after 0.98 has been shaken down: a month or so.
- 1.0 will be the same as 0.99: the only changes will be eventual
trivial bug-fixes in case 0.99 has some problems. This is just to
try to get over the "X.0" bug syndrome.
There are a few on-going projects: depending on circumstances these will
be implemented sooner or later, so I won't give any promises. These
include: loadable drivers/fs's (alpha-patches already availabla), full
support for different block-sizes (some work still required), and a
extensive rewrite of the mm routines (I'll want to make a vmm interface
similar to the vfs interface for the filesystem routines).
Linus
-----
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Subject: Re: 0.97 patchlevel 5 available
Date: 12 Sep 1992 22:42:41 GMT
In article <15255@borg.cs.unc.edu> martin@franck.cs.unc.edu (Kevin Martin)
writes:
>In article <1992Sep12.182131.2168@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
>torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) writes:
>
>>Patch 5 should also fix the problems with iopl() that resulted in the
>>X8514-server having problems with 0.97.pl2 and above.
>
>I've just tested the 8514/A X server with 0.97.pl5 and it works
>beautifully. The problems with the X server appearing to hang when
>quitting from TWM with the 0.97.pl2 and more recent kernels are
>fixed. Thanks Linux!
Actually, thank Kevin Martin: he was able to give me a good bug-report
that made it pretty easy to track it all down (he even had a minimal
program which showed the incorrect behaviour).
Other changes that pl5 has include:
- slightly edited <asm/io.h>: easily editable IO delay instructions.
The default delay-instruction is now a 'inb' from port 0x80: this
should be a bit safer than the outb. But you can easily change it to
the "standard" two short jumps or whatever.
- malloc() is cleaned up, and 'malloc_grab_pages()' is gone (Biro)
- I cleaned up the internal inode structure a bit: i_data[] is no
longer part of the base inode, but is instead part of the union of
fs-dependent info. Pipes also have their own cleaner interface.
- the msmouse patches are in: currently there is no valid test that a
msmouse actually exists, so linux always says "mouse detected and
installed", but that is nothing to worry about.
- the msdos-fs one-line performance patch is in.
The most important fix for ext-fs users should be the fact that pl5
should fix the ext-fs bugs: the ext-fs patches are essentially the same
that pl3+4 did to the minix-fs. So now the new 'strip' should be safe
on all filesystem types.
Note that the upcoming release of gcc (and thus the upcoming X11 2.0)
will require at least 0.97.pl4 in order to be safely used: I'll probably
make a bootimage of 0.97.5 available for those that don't want to (or
are unable to) recompile the kernel. I'll just wait a day or two to see
if there are some unexpected problems with pl5.
Linus
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Linus "dances with patches" Torvalds strikes again: I've already made
patchlevel 4 of 0.97. It may not be a new record, but it's close :-)
Patch 4 is a very minor patch, but it's pretty important if you want a
stable filesystem (and let's face it: most people seem to prefer a
filesystem that stays up a bit longer). While patch3 corrected most of
the race-conditions in the minix fs, I overlooked the [f]truncate system
calls, and this new patch corrects that.
[f]truncate is a very race-prone function, and as if that wasn't enough,
there was also a pretty bad error in truncate.c that resulted in the
indirect blocks not being correctly marked dirty when doing partial
truncates. The latter problem is probably the reason for most of the
filesystem corruptions that have been reported - the race-conditions
were a lot harder to fix, but they also happen a lot less often.
Note that the [f]truncate bug isn't new: it has been in the kernel since
[f]truncate was first implemented (0.95?). But until now, [f]truncate()
hasn't actually been used very much - only the latest versions of the
binutils have used ftruncate to strip binaries etc. So the problem
hasn't shown up that much.
So while I consider patch4 to be crucial, you /can/ actually live
without it: I haven't seen the buffer corruption problem at all (until I
actually tested for it after getting good bug-reports), so you can
provably miss it for a long time. But if you have ever had corruption
problems, I'd suggest upgrading to pl4 as soon as possible.
The corruption problems show up most clearly when using a new "strip"
binary, although they are theoretically possible with other programs
too. Thanks to "obz@raster.kodak.com" and "jon@robots.ox.ac.uk" for
good bug-reports: thanks to them I was able to pin down the error to
truncate.c, and after that it was pretty easy to get rid of it.
Also note that this patch still hasn't fixed the extended filesystem: I
suspect the same bugs lurk around there. I'll get it corrected by 0.98
at the latest.
The patch is included at the end of this post (it's very minor - it
contains patches mainly against linux/fs/minix/truncate.c) , and I'll
also update nic.funet.fi (pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus) to have the new
sources. Sorry for the inconvenience,
Linus
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Well, 0.97.pl3 is available both as full source (linux-0.97.3.tar.Z) and
as a context diff (linux-0.97.patch3.Z) on nic.funet.fi, in the normal
directory (pob/OS/Linux/testing/Linus). It seems some line is once more
down on the way to the US, so I haven't uploaded it to tsx-11 yet.
Also, I haven't been able to use the pub/Linux/Linus directory on
sunsite (it dies on me when I try to send the group password), so I
don't know when sunsite will get the new release.
Patch3 is almost 100kB even compressed, as there were quite big changes
in the mm and minix fs. No major new features: there are two new system
calls: swapoff(const char * swapfile) and wait4(), and linux accepts
several swap-files, but the rest of the thing is mostly bug-fixes or
simply rewrites.
Major changes:
- new swap-page handling: linux no longer uses just one bit to keep
track of used swap-space, but a counter for each swap-page. This
allows processes to share swap-pages after a fork(), and should
result in /major/ performance increases on machines with less memory.
I've seen better performance even with 8MB - I wouldn't be surprised
if 4MB machines would re-compile the kernel noticeably faster under
pl3. I'd be interested to hear numbers.
- The low 1MB memory that isn't used directly by the kernel is now
swappable memory, instead of being hardcoded for buffer cache. The
patches for this were originally by tytso, and I expanded on it a bit
more. This might also help better performance on 2-4MB machines.
Note that this does /not/ mean that you can use 1M machines for
linux: linux still needs some extended memory.
- the dosfs has been upgraded to dosfs.8 - patches by almesber.
- I edited the minix fs pretty heavily to remove a couple of race-
conditions. The same races still exist in the extended fs, as I
didn't have time to edit that yet. The minix-fs took precedence as I
know that better, and extfs isn't "official" yet anyway.
other changes:
- the mouse-driver now handles both Logitech (minor = 0) and PS/2
(minor = 1) busmice.
- there is a proc-fs for access to user memory/files etc.
- better support for the tcp/ip patches (but see below...)
- corrected symlink and /dev/[k]mem behaviour
- Lars Wirzenius' README (with minimal comments by me) and the GNU
COPYING notice are now part of the normal kernel setup, and can be
found in the tar-archive.
- the floppy ioctl() to get the FD parameters no longer requires root
priviledges. Thus, the msdos emulator runs even for a normal user.
Some comments on patchlevel 3:
mm:
The swap-page handling resulted in a reduction of swap-file (or
partition) size to a maximum of 16MB per file. It's nothing inherent to
the code, but it eased some algorithms, so I didn't bother coding around
it. After all, 16MB is enough for most people, and if you want more,
you can have up to 128 swapfiles of 16MB each. If I get enough
hate-mail about it, I might just try to find the energy to correct it.
Maybe.
Bigger swapfiles will still work, but linux will take advantage of only
the low 16MB. Also, there is no nifty logic to try to optimize the
usage of the swap-files: pages are simply allocated from one swap-file
until it fills up, and then the next swap-file is used.
The memory management changes break ps/free once more, but not very
much. Also, I changed the load-average counting, so 'w' also needs
slight editing. On the other hand, I made '/dev/kmem' mmap()able, and
'ps' and 'free' should be edited to take advantage of that: it should
result in much faster operation, as well as possibly using less real
memory.
fs:
The fs changes should remove at least two races - the races don't happen
very often, but they were theoretically possible, and might be the
reason for some fs corruption problems that have been reported. The
changes are related to the use of bmap() - the bmap interface doesn't
really lend itself to some things that it was used for. Re-writing
internal fs-functions not to use bmap not only should have removed any
races, but also actually resulted in cleaner code.
The proc-fs code isn't too beautiful, and I'll probably leave it out
from 0.98 unless I can make it loadable. We'll see. If anybody wants
to use it, you can do something like
# mount -t proc /dev/ram /proc
Instead of /dev/ram you can use any block device - it's not used, and is
only a dummy as the proc-fs doesn't actually use any external device.
(but note that the device is still marked as mounted, so you cannot
mount it for anything else).
kernel/mm/lib:
The TCP/IP patches are also essentially in 0.97.pl3 - not the full
TCP/IP directory, only the patches to the main kernel. NOTE!! I don't
like the 'grab_malloc_pages()' function, so I left that out, and added a
GFP_ATOMIC priority to get_free_page() that should be used instead. I
hope this will be used (Ross?), as it's a lot cleaner.
Also, I hope the tcp/ip people will clean up malloc() so that it doesn't
panic instead of returning NULL etc. Ugly, ugly. This is related to
the get_free_page(GFP_ATOMIC) changes, and I'd like to have patches as
soon as possible - tcp/ip won't be part of the standard kernel until
that can be cleaned up.
Linus
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As promised, 0.97.pl2 is out today (well, over here it's already
tomorrow, so I guess I'm 35 minutes late. Naughty, naughty). Right
now, the patch (and full source for those that don't like to patch up
the system) is available at "nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus",
but I'll try to put it on some other sites as well if I'm able and
energetic enough. Probably tomorrow - together with a binary for those
that aren't willing to comple the kernel on their own.
0.97.2 has mostly my mm/fs patches, along with some relatively minor
diffs by others (including file locking by Doug Evans). User-level
changes are minor: but the mm has changed a lot, and the vfs routines
have been changed to keep track of the error-messages a bit better.
Also, the vfs-interface to "follow_link()" changed slightly: people who
are making filesystems should look at the changes (but they are
relatively minor, and shouldn't result in any problems - both the
extended fs and minix fs needed just a simple change in their respective
symlink.c files).
The mm changes /might/ lower performance slightly, as the paging TLB's
are now flushed at every task-switch due to the new system, but I doubt
it's noticeable. The other performance changes (dynamic buffers etc) in
0.97(.pl1) should overshadow that particular problem.
I hope this release means that these kinds of low-level rewrites aren't
needed for a while: the last couple of releases have changed some very
fundamental things. Nothing seems to have suffered too badly, but I'd
be happier if it all got tested more thoroughly. Anyway, discounting
the ps/free etc suite of programs, everything I have tried has worked
flawlessly despite the big kernel changes.
I'm still worried about the reports about messed-up buffers, but have
been unable to reproduce the problem, and nobody has so far
disillusioned me about my guess that it's a problem with the SCSI code
(which at least gives me an excuse for not doing anything about it :-).
Other problems include at least one report of spontaneous re-booting,
which is totally inexplicable, so I'm blaming hardware once more until I
can get better data on the thing.
As to patches sent by others: 0.97.2 contains very little of that kind
of code. I've been too busy either working, or implementing my own
changes that I have simply ignored them for the most part. Remind me
(or resend them relative to the new kernel) if you have a patch that is
still needed.
There is one new system call: 'vm86(struct vm86_struct * info)'. It's
not ready for general use yet - it works, but will probably need some
tweaking before being practical. But supporting a virtual 86 mode was
so easy after the mm rewrite that I felt it was worth implementing: the
vm86 code is less than 50 lines of C right now.
Linus
PS. The bright spot of the week goes to "The Oxford Beer Trolls" - all
UK inhabitants should probably be locked into some (big) mental
institution and TOBT should probably have a wing of their own, but
thanks to them linux can now call itself "beerware" :-)
|
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It seems all connections to Finland are down (or at least some server is
acting up), so patch1 is available only on nic.funet.fi:
pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus/linux-0.97.patch1.Z
I'll upload it to the other sites when I get a working ftp-connection.
Patch 1 is essentially a performance-release, but it also contains some
other patches: Ross Biro's tcp-ip stubs are there (but not the tcpip
subdirectory: alpha-testers should know where to find that), as are the
ext-fs superblock cleanups. The first header-file patch by hlu is also
in there.
The resulting patch is pretty big - it's also not as cleaned up as I'd
like it to be. The swapping/buffer-block handling heuristics are
better, but could still do with some tuning. Also, the idle task in
this version doesn't do very much: it will be expanded to do some more
page-table calculations.
I will be unable to hack on linux for a couple of weeks (I'll still
answer mails, read the newsgroup and fix bugs, but no heavy-duty
hacking) due to some "circumstances beyond my control". That probably
means that this patch is the last one for a while (three weeks) unless
some bad bugs show up.
Linus
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Linux version 0.97 is available as both a complete source-tree
(linux-0.97.tar.Z) and a bootimage (bootimage-0.97.Z) on the normal
ftp-sites. It's in incoming on tsx-11.mit.edu, so it will take a day or
two to actually show up, but it's available right now on
nic.funet.fi:
pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus/
banjo.concert.net:
pub/Linux/Linus/
The nic.funet.fi-directory is under 'testing' not so much because this
would be a testing-release, but because the directory-setup is in
testing :-). I think 'testing' is unreadable, so you have to cd to the
directory blindly.
There is also a kernel-compilation README (written by Lars Wirzenius),
as well as a COPYING (which is just a pointer to the GNU copyleft). The
latter not because anything has changed, but because I got a few mails
pointing out that the copyright of linux wasn't too clear. That also
resulted in changing the '(C)'s in the source to 'Copyright'.
Changes in 0.97:
- The VESA-support was removed. I'd be happy to put it back once it
works on all hardware. Instead of the VESA-code, I finally put in
the automatic SVGA setup patches. See the top-level Makefile.
- The IRQ code has solidified, and should work on all machines. Not
all of the SCSI drivers use it yet, so I expect patches for that..
- Serial interrupts are handled slightly differently, and performance
should be up. I've sent out a few alpha-releases, and testing seems
to indicate that's actually true this time. Reactions have ranged
from "nice" to "wonderful" :-)
- The buffer-cache and memory management code has been edited quite a
bit. ps/free etc programs that reads kernel memory directly no
longer work, and even a recompilation won't be enough. They actually
need editing before they work.
The buffer-cache now grows and shrinks dynamically depending on how
much free memory there is. Shift+PrintScreen will give some memory
statistics. (Ctrl+PrSc gives task-info, ALT+PrSc gives current
register values).
The mm code changes removed some race-conditions in the VM code, and
I also tried to make the Out-of-swapspace error less severe (better
thrashing-detection etc).
- The super-block code has been cleaned up. Especially the extended fs
needs to be edited a bit to take advantage of the new setup, and I
expect Remy Card will have a patch out eventually.
- include-files have been moved around some more: there are still some
names that clash with the standard headers, but not many.
- Unswappable processes implemented: by default only 'init' is
unswappable. This is a bit safer in low-memory conditions, as at
least init won't die due to low memory. I also made killing init
impossible: if init doesn't recognize a signal, it simply won't get
it. Some other changes ("while (1) fork();" won't kill the machine
for non-root users etc)
- The new SCSI drivers are in. These make the kernel noticeably
bigger, but you can leave them out if you don't want them.
- The floppy- and hd-drivers print out more debugging-info in case of
errors: this might be irritating if you have hardware that works, but
often gives soft-errors. On the other hand, some old debugging-info
was removed - notably for user-level protection errors etc.
- Various minor fixes. I haven't made cdiffs (and I haven't gotten any
requests for them, so I probably never will), but they would be
pretty big.
Things that I didn't have time for:
- I wanted to rewrite the tty drivers to be more "streams-like" (ie not
an actual streams-implementation, but some of the ideas from
streams). I never got around to it: there was simply too much else
to do.
- I got a lot of patches, and some went in, others didn't. If you
think your patch was important, please re-send it relative to the new
version.
I'd like comments on the new system: performance / clarity of code etc.
0.97 should correct all known bugs (at least the ones I know about), but
I guess that's just wishful thinking.
Note that the dynamic buffer-code also handles differently-sized
buffers, but that the rest of the system (block device drivers,
filesystem code etc) cannot yet take advantage of this - there is still
some coding needed.
Linus
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The subject pretty much says it all: I've sent out the "weekly patch"
and I'd be very interested in comments. As with patch1, there are some
very fundamental changes in the kernel, and they might have some
problems. I'd want as many as possible to test out linux-0.96c.pl2, as
that has always been the best way to test out the changes. Everything
works on my machine, but that doesn't guarantee it will work on other
setups...
The MAJOR change in 0.96c.pl2 is the totally rewritten sleep/wakeup
code. That, together with the IRQ code introduced in pl1 and slightly
edited in pl2, means that two very fundamental things in the linux
kernel have changed in the last two weeks. The code is cleaner, easier
to add devices to, and hopefully faster, but it's still a bit risky to
change this kind of very low-level behaviour.
Select() is now implemented using the vfs jump tables, and thanks to the
better sleep/wakup interface, select() performance should be noticeably
better. At least xload seems to give lower load-averages, and I hope
ka9q will work better with the new kernel. Note that things like the
tty code doesn't yet take full advantage of the new features the
rewritten sleep offers, but I wanted to get a good testing-release out
before actually tweaking all the routines to use the new interface.
The IRQ routines have changed slightly, and all known bugs are fixed.
While I'm most interested to hear comments about the IRQ and
select/sleep/wakup code, there are a few other changes in pl2:
- Swiss keyboard support.
- Screen blanking now only reacts to key-presses and kernel messages:
normal tty output doesn't make the screen unblank.
- DOS-fs version 5 is in. It wouldn't hurt to try it out. It's
somewhat alpha still, but it seems to work. mtools should be a thing of
the past once the dosfs is a bit more tested.
- core-file magic number, and a minor bug in ptrace is fixed
- a bus-mouse is supported. I'd like to hear if it still works after I
did the select() patches "blind" (I can't test it on my machine).
- iopl changing is possible (but requires root priviledges): this
allows access to all IO ports, as well as the interrupt flag. Don't use
it unless /absolutely/ necessary: a bug in your program will most likely
crash the machine if you are running with IO priviledges. It's needed
for some X VGA drivers.
As a result of all the changes, the diff is pretty big. Apply and build
it with something like:
cd /usr/src
zcat linux-0.96c.patch2.Z | patch -p0
cd linux
make dep
make clean
make Image
assuming you have the 0.96c.pl1 kernel in /usr/src/linux. I've had some
reports that my patches won't always go in cleanly: I know for a fact
that patch1 patches cleanly (I rebuilt 0.96c.pl1 by downloading it all
from banjo), so the error is in your end.
Possible problems:
- The VESA code in setup.S has some problems. I haven't even looked
into it yet, so if it won't work for you, please either (a) use the
unpatched setup.S from 0.96c, or (b) try to find the problem and tell
me. (b) is preferable, of course. I'd like to have VESA support, but
if the bug isn't found, I'll have to use the non-VESA version for 0.97.
- The IRQ code in 0.96c.pl1 could overrun the stack if linux got
un-ending interrupt requests, resulting in a re-boot. With pl2, this
shouldn't happen: linux should print out something like "Recursive
interrupt on IRQx. Shutting down" and simply disable the problematic
IRQ line. If you see this message, I'd be very interested to hear about
it (which IRQ, what devices you have, etc).
- And any new or old bugs I haven't found yet.
I have one report that 0.96c.pl1 has problems with the inode table, and
panics on bootup with a "no more inodes in mem" report. Can anybody
confirm this sighting? I haven't found the reason for it, and haven't
seen it myself. I'm hoping it's an installation problem, but if anybody
else sees the same behaviour, I'm SOL.
Linus
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I have sent off my first patch to 0.96c: as usual it's available
directly from banjo.concert.net while nic.funet.fi and tsx-11.mit.edu
might take a day or two to put it into the right directories.
linux-0.96c.patch1 contains more changes than I originally envisioned: I
changed the IRQ routines and the serial code to be easier and cleaner
(and hopefully more efficient) and I thought that would be it. I was
wrong.
I got several patches (and one bug-report) again, and while I haven't
had time to check them all, some of them are in. Fixes:
- Remy Cards correction to the out-of-space problem with the extended
fs is here. Most people using the ext-fs might already have applied
this patch, in which case you might have problems patching.
- my ftruncate() fix is here. Again, if you already did the trivial
patch by hand, you'll get errors when patching.
- almesber's implementation of read-only filesystems is here (after
editing by yours truly). The mount() system call now accepts a flags
integer as well as a pointer to some arbitraty data in user space for
some special mount() calls. The general flags allow (a) read-only
mounting, (b) disabling of suid executables (c) disabling of device
special files and (d) total disabling of executables on a per-filesystem
basis. The filesystem specific mount() info isn't currently used by any
fs, but can be used to specify additional information that depends on a
special fs type (a password or similar would be possible..)
- the rename() system call had a bug in that it allowed moving over a
directory: I think the code to handle this was lost in the vfs editing,
and although the GNU mv utility checked it, a malicious (or just
unsuspecting) program can destroy the fs using this. Thanks for the
bug-report: it was very easy to add once I saw the problem.
- support for vesa-standard svga cards in setup.S. I'm unable to test
this, but my svga card still works after the patch, so I left it in in
the hope that it doesn't break for anybody else.
- various minor editing by me, or minor patches sent in by others.
The full cdiff is almost 50kB compressed, so this is a bigger-than-usual
patch. Hope there are no problems. People who are using the new SCSI
drivers might have problems with my changes to the SCSI irq-setup
changes, so be careful (actually using the original sources might be a
good idea, and then upgrading again). I hope to get the new SCSI
drivers into the kernel soon (definitely in time for 0.98).
I'd be interested to hear comments on serial line performance, bugs,
features, etc. As usual, I'm hoping this release won't contain any new
bugs while fixing all the old ones, but I guess that's likely to happen
right after the first winter olympics in Hell.
Linus
PS. Maybe nobody noticed, but I actually never made the patches to
0.96c available. As nobody has complained, I assume everybody just got
the complete kernel sources and used that. Unless somebody actually
asks for them, I don't think there is any point in making them any more.
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The latest kernel version is 0.96c: the binary and sources can be found
on banjo.concert.net: pub/Linux/Linus as usual. I haven't made the
cdiffs yet, and I'll upload those tomorrow (at the same time I'll put it
on the other sites as well).
0.96c is actually what I called patch3 earlier this week, but as the new
features were pretty big and the cdiff's are probably going to be bigger
than the normal patches, I decided I might as well make it a totally new
minor release and make a bootimage and complete source available.
0.96c contains:
- bugfixes (tty, console driver, pty's, sockets)
- fifo's (names pipes - Paul Hargrove & editing by me)
- the alpha extended filesystem (Remy Card)
- st_blocks implemented (ie du, ls give reasonable if not exact values
for disk-space used)
- Makefile cleanups and warnings at compile-time removed
Note that while the extended filesystem code is there, and this kernel
successfully mounts and uses the new filesystem (with long filenames and
>64MB partitions), it's still under testing: I haven't made the mkefs
program available, and the extended filesystem features shouldn't be
used for other than testing right now.
Some of the changes are just cleanups: most of the warnings when
compiling the new kernel should be gone (not counting the scsi code
which is still the old non-cleaned-up version), and the make'ing of the
kernel is more logical now.
The bugfixes include the corrected console.c driver, the socket
corrections (without which X sometimes locks up), some pty semantics
corrections (although I'm still not certain it's correct) and some
editing in the general tty driver (including fixing the bug introduced
in 0.96b.pl2 that caused a reboot with uninitialized tty devices).
While the extended filesystem support isn't "official" yet, I can
happily report that my limited testing hasn't found any problems with
long filenames etc. It still needs a fsck program, but 1.0 looks like a
real possibility soon.
Linus
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|
As promised, here is the second patch for 0.96b which hopefully clears
up the problems with some mice by implementing most of the serial line
flags like 5-8 bit characters and parity. It mainly corrects only
serial problems, but there are a couple of other patches in it too: the
fsqrt emulation patch is here, so if you already did it, you'll get a
bad patch for that file (which you can ignore). This patch also changes
all instances of signal-setting to use the "send_sig()" subroutine which
should allow gdb to debug all signals.
Apart from the serial lines, I also cleaned up the general tty-handling
routines slightly and removed at least one race-condition in the tty
code. I don't know if it's noticeable, though.
You'll need patch1 (available from all the normal sites) in order to
apply this one. As usual, I'd like to hear if this patch does help
people, or if there are new problems. This patch will also be available
on the normal ftp sites, but as it was pretty minor, I decided I might
as well include it in the post (uuencoded and compressed).
(I also corrected the all-time favourite bug: linux now reports the
right version number once more..)
Linus
[ Note to people that have sent me patches: I haven't had time to do
them. In some cases (the IBM char-set & BBS patch) other changes made
them unpatchable, in other cases I did the patch in a different way, and
yet other patches I was just too lazy to apply. As usual, re-sending
the patch relative to the newest version is a good idea, although it
still doesn't guarantee I'll use it ]
|
|
In article <arumble.709312764@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU> arumble@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU
(Anthony Rumble) writes:
>
>YES! I have noticed this VERY exact thing also!
Oh, well: it's a bug in the serial drivers that I have already fixed,
but I haven't done the c-diffs yet. I have rewritten big parts of the
serial line code to be more easily configured for different IRQ numbers,
and I noticed the bug while doing that. I'll make patch1 for 0.96b
available later today or tomorrow.
patch1 will be mostly just the serial driver code: it allows changing
the irq's (and port addresses) of serial devices on the fly (with an
ioctl call), so people that have ser4 on irq5 etc shouldn't have to
recompile the kernel. It also returns EBUSY if you try to open a serial
line that shares the irq-line with another line etc.
Another change in patch1 will the the handling of ctrl-alt-del: it will
send a SIGINT to the init process if the reset-function is disabled.
This makes it ideal for a controlled shutdown, but it does need a
/bin/init that knows about this.
Linus
PS. It seems both the DOS-fs and the extended fs will be out for
alpha-testing next week, so I assume 0.97 will have them both if things
work out ok.
|
|
I have uploaded my newest kernel sources and a US-keyboard image to both
tsx-11.mit.edu and nic.funet.fi. I'll put it on banjo too as soon as
banjo wakes up (that's when I'll do the patches too: I'll need access to
banjo to get a 0.96a.pl4 kernel to make patches against..). As usual,
it will probably be a day or two until the files have been moved from
the incoming directory to their proper places.
0.96b is not a new major release: it's pretty close to 0.96a with all my
patches (1-4). However, as there has been 4 patches already, I decided
it would be time for a full kernel release along with a bootimage, so
that people who don't feel confident with patching can use the new
features.
If you already have 0.96a patchlevel 4, 0.96b will offer you these new
features:
- the math-emulation now handles fsqrt, as gcc-2.2.2 generates that
inline. I haven't tested the kernel code at all: I tested the
algorithm in user space, but I'm lazy, so I never turned off my 387
to do real testing. I hope it works.
- better vt100 terminal emulation thanks to Mika Liljeberg.
- I removed a possible race-condition in the buffer-cache code.
- minor fixes
The vt100 emulation should now be complete enough for almost everything
(including vt100 test suites): as a result the setterm utility had to be
changed (as the old setterm codes aren't compatible with the full vt100
codes). setterm-0.96b.tar.Z contains the new setterm.
The soon-to-be-released gcc-2.2.2 will need the 0.96b kernel: (a) due to
the fsqrt emulation and (b) it uses the new stat() system call. So
upgrading is a good idea. (If you have a co-processor, (a) isn't used,
but (b) still stands)
If you have an unpatched 0.96a, the differences to 0.96b are roughly
(not counting the above-mentioned new things):
- corrected the disk-buffer-list bug with read/write-errors
- fixed read-ahead warning messages at end of disk
- better support for text-mode restoration after running MGR and X
- full core-dumping, attach/detach etc debugging features
- 16550A support
- less low 1MB memory used for kernel structures
- various minor fixes
Note that the fact that new versions (pl4 and above) use more memory in
the 1M+ area means that linux will report less free memory (it's used
for buffer-cache instead). This could concievably be a problem on 2MB
machines. The standard kernel comes with only 4 pty's though, and if
you use the standard 80x25 text modes instead of svga modes, the VC
buffers will be smaller. Please contact me if there are problems even
with this minimal setup.
0.96b does /not/ contain: the new scsi drivers, new filesystems or some
other patches I have gotten (ibm character set mode, loop-devices etc).
If you have sent me any other patch, you might want to remind me about
it.
Linus
|
|
Ok, patch4 implements 32-bit inode numbers (and thus the new
stat/lstat/fstat system calls), as well as correcting the bad
rs-performance on some machines that showed up in patch3. It's
currently only on banjo, but I'll copy it around eventually.
Again, you don't miss much if you don't use this patch: it's mainly for
(a) the serial problems and (b) for hlu etc that want to test out the
32-bit interface. It does some other magical tricks as well (uses less
memory in the low 1M region by moving the screen and tty buffer to high
memory), if anybody is interested.
Linus
|
|
Ok, I already announced it on the kernel mailing-list, but I might as
well go all the way. I put out patch3 to 0.96a yesterday, and it's
available on banjo in pub/Linux/Linus, and I'll upload it to the other
normal ftp-sites tonight.
NOTE! Patch3 is (like patch2) more of a kernel-hacker patch: it's just
in case you want to keep up with my kernel. It has some problems with
some serial lines, and if you experience them, I'd like to know what
type of chip you are running (and what linux reports on bootup). If you
don't think patching the kernel is fun, you might as well forget this
and wait for a real release (next month?).
Patch 3 contains:
- support for attaching and detaching processes under gdb (but you need
a gdb that knows about this).
- 16550A support
- full core-dumping (again, you need a gdb that supports it)
- sockets have no problems with non-root binding etc
- /dev/zero implemented (mknod /dev/zero c 1 5)
None of the patches are very big (the whole patch is 17kB compressed,
most of it attach/detach code), but they are all pretty useful.
The 16550A support means that with the appropriate chip you now should
be able to use the serial ports at much higher speeds, but as mentioned,
it seems to break on some machines.
The detaching isn't perfect yet (I noticed only after making the diffs
that I had forgotten to do some cleanups), but it's not generally a
problem (the code just forgets to give the process back to it's rightful
father).
The patch is relative to the pl2 kernel, so you have to use the earlier
patches first. This time, I've added the lib/itimer.c code.
16550A support was written by tdavis, the correct format of the
core-dumps was written by eric (who also wrote the attach/detach code I
used as an example when implementing it), /dev/zero was written by
almesber. Nice to see good patches: I just did the socket-thing and
rewrote the attaching to suit me.
Linus
|
|
I have just sent off the second patch to 0.96a: it should be on the
normal ftp-sites (nic, tsx-11 and banjo), although the only site which I
can make it directly readable on is banjo, so on the other sites it will
take the site-managers to make the patch available.
Patch 2 implements:
- itimers (by Darren Senn), which are now also used to implement the
alarm() system call.
- ultrastor scsi driver patches (by gentzel)
- [f]statfs() system call is implemented (so df can be made fs-
independent). Also some other minor fs-changes for the upcoming new
filesystem. Patches by Remy Card.
- preliminary core-file dumping code (linux creates a core-file, but
it's not in the correct format yet [*]).
- minor changes/bugfixes.
While patching in patch1 is a good idea for anybody, patch 2 isn't
really vital. I've made it available just so kernel hackers can keep up
with the kernel I have right now if they wish. Patch 2 is relative to
patch 1: you have to patch that in first.
[*] The current core-file is very simple, and the kernel code is there
just so that some enterprising character can expand it. A core-file
looks like this right now:
offset data
0x0000 "core-dump: regs=\n"
0x0040 struct pt_regs (see <sys/ptrace.c>)
0x0400 "floating-point regs:\n"
0x0440 struct i387 (see <linux/sched.h>)
0x0800 the first 1kB of user-space
Not very practical, but it /might/ help if the X-server dies of a
segmentation fault or similar (you can use pt_regs.eip to see where it
happened). The kernel code is very easy to change to accomodate for the
real core-file format, I just didn't know what it should be.
Linus
|
|
Here is the patch to 0.96a that corrects the harddisk error bug, dup2()
and X11 text-mode restoration. Thanks to Rick Sladkey for finding the
dup2() bug.
This patch has also been sent to the ftp-archives.
Linus
|
|
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
|
|
In article <1992Apr20.085143.23027@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) writes:
> [ trace not working in gdb ]
>
>My personal version handles this correctly (as well as doing some other
>things in a cleaner manner), but I'm not quite ready for a new release
>yet. I could make YAAR (yet another alpha-release) or just mail
>interested parties the fixes needed - mail me if you're interested, and
>depending on the number of messages I get I'll make it a new release.
Ok, the response seems to make a new pre-release appropriate: I have
uploaded "pre-0.96.tar.Z" to tsx-11 and nic.
Here is what the pre-release contains:
- truncate/ftruncate/fchmod/fchown system calls
note that there aren't any library functions for these, so they
aren't very useful yet...
[f]truncate needed a change in the logic of the internal
truncate VFS call - anybody that has any nonstandard filesystem
probably needs to look it up.
- io-bitmap syscalls giving root-processes access to selected io ports
from user space. There is a "ioperm()" system call that lets the
process select which ports it wants to enable/disable (all ports
disabled as default) as well as a (standard sysv?) ioctl interface
that X uses.
again, no library stubs, but it allows things like reading and
setting the cmos clock without using /dev/port, as well as
control over the VGA registers...
- mmap for /dev/mem
more things needed for X...
- the signal-handling fixes needed for gdb
These aren't yet complete: serial lines still send signals under
interrupts that can result in problems (ie ptrace doesn't
correctly get them), but that's pretty unlikely (and will be
fixed in the final 0.96). Breakpoints should work etc..
- multiple shared libraries
Up to 6 simultaneous shared libraries/process: the patches were
originally by pmacdona, but they were heavily changed by me, and
I think they work in a more natural manner now. One user-level
change is that the libraries are now checked for read and
execute permissions for safety-reasons.
- cleaned up special files.
read/write/ioctl no longer has special-case code: it is all
handled with tables to functions. This will mean that the SCSI
patches won't patch in quite cleanly into 0.96: you'll need to
add the code that sets up the functions.
Again: device drivers and vfs-filesystem hackers need to look
into the changes, although they are pretty logical (earlier
versions just didn't implement all the vfs-routines)
Note that the vfs-code for select is still not used: select is
hardcoded for the devices it supports right now.
- ptrace() has a new interface
as gdb for versions < 0.95c don't work on the new version, and
gdb won't work very well at all on 0.95c[+], there was no reason
not to break ptrace. Thus 0.96 has a new calling convention for
ptrace, and the old ptrace library function no longer works.
I'm including the new ptrace library function at the end of this
post.
- mount() takes 4 arguments, and checks that only the super-user can
mount/umount things.
Happily this shouldn't break any old binaries.
- some general cleanups
I've made the pre-release available only as pure source code: no diffs,
no binary. The reason is that most people that needed this release want
it for the gdb-fixes: and they should have no problem recompiling the
kernel. Others just have to wait for the real 0.96.
Changes that are NOT in this pre-release, but which I hope to have in
the real 0.96:
- more include-file cleanups - I'm still working on these
- the wd8003 driver and hopefully some other parts of biro's
config.
- select() using the vfs-tables.
And possibly bugfixes that people find in this pre-release...
Linus
========== library ptrace.c (wants gcc=2.1) ==========
#define __LIBRARY__
#include <time.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int ptrace(int request, int pid, int addr, int data)
{
long ret;
long res;
if (request > 0 && request < 4)
(long *)data = &ret;
__asm__ volatile ("int $0x80"
:"=a" (res)
:"0" (__NR_ptrace),"b" (request), "c" (pid),
"d" (addr), "S" (data)
: "si","bx","cx","dx");
if (res >= 0) {
if (request > 0 && request < 4) {
errno = 0;
return (ret);
}
return (int) res;
}
errno = -res;
return -1;
}
|
|
Well, only one known bug so far, but a couple of problems. I thought I'd
mention them before anyone else does, and we'll call them "features" :^)
The BUG:
when using the readdir() system call, linux incorrectly doesn't let go
of the last buffer used for reading: this results in the buffer being
marked as used (and if you use readdir() heavily, the counter will
eventually wrap around, which might result in incorrect marking as
"not used"). This bug happily isn't easy to find: no current binary
uses the readdir() system call unless you have gotten your hands on
the new VFS gcc-2.1 release. Thanks to Remy Card for finding this
one.
Not too bad a bug though: the fix is very easy. Add a 'brelse(bh);'
in the minix_readdir() function, like this:
if (i) {
put_fs_long(de->inode,&dirent->d_ino);
put_fs_byte(0,i+dirent->d_name);
put_fs_word(i,&dirent->d_reclen);
return i;
should really be :
if (i) {
put_fs_long(de->inode,&dirent->d_ino);
put_fs_byte(0,i+dirent->d_name);
put_fs_word(i,&dirent->d_reclen);
+ brelse (bh);
return i;
That is, just add the brelse before the early return. Sorry for the
lack of real cdiffs - I'm not at home right now, and the above was
taken directly from the bug-report mail.
The problems:
I've had one report that the floppy-driver in versions 0.95x breaks
when accessing drive nr 2. It doesn't on my machine, but I'd
appreciate it if people would test it out, and mail me about any
problems. So far, only one report, but that's one too many.
0.95c doesn't correctly keep track of the 'rss' field in the
task-structure. A fix was already posted (and nothing breaks even if
you don't apply the fix - ps just gives slightly incorrect output)
And the expected troubles with the change of 'a.out.h' - the old gdb
doesn't recognize new executables etc.
As soon as I get my own sources cleaned up, I'll send out a new binary
for the 0.95c+ kernel to the ftp-sites. I've gotten a few mails from
people unable to recompile everything - either because of lack of
diskspace or some other problem. Tomorrow I'll put the new kernel image
on nic.funet.fi and tsx-11 - it's basically the 0.95c kernel + the above
bugfix + the lp-patches (somewhat edited by me).
Linus
<README-0.95c+>
This is release 0.95c+ of the linux kernel - it contains some
enhancements and bugfixes to the 0.95a kernel, as well as some minor
fixes relative to the last alpha-patch (0.95c). The release is
available as
- binary (bootimage-0.95c+.Z)
- full source (linux-0.95c+.tar.Z)
- patches rel. to 0.95c (diff-0.95c.c+.Z)
- patches rel. to 0.95a (diff-0.95a.c+.Z)
NOTE TO PATCHERS!! Before patching, do this:
- make an empty include-file linux/include/checkpoint.h
- rename linux/kernel/math/math_emulate.c as just emulate.c
That is, from the linux source directory do:
$ > include/checkpoint.h
$ mv kernel/math/math_emulate.c kernel/math/emulate.c
Also note that patching from the 0.95a version is probably not worth it
as it's easier to get the complete new sources.
Although I'm making binaries and the full source available, this isn't
really a major release: there is no new rootdisk, and this is more "my
current kernel" and not really tested (I put in the last changes 5
minutes before packing all this up).
The reason I'm making this available is that with the advent of gcc-2.1
and the VFS-library the old kernel doesn't really do everything the new
libraries want: the readdir system call is needed to get things working.
The default compiler after this release is considered to be gcc-2.0 or
higher (although 1.40 still works - you don't /have/ to change). People
who are unable or unwilling to patch a new kernel shouldn't be unable to
run the new binaries.
This kernel should be totally backwards compatible, so no binaries
should break. I resisted adding the changed mount() system call into
this release: the next major release will have a third parameter for
mount() - the filesystem type name (ie mount /dev/xxx /mnt minix).
Fixes relative to 0.95c:
- corrected two minor bugs in readdir() (thanks to R Card)
- lp-patches are in. I've edited them a bit, and will probably do some
more editing in the future, but they seem to work fine.
- 8-bit ISO latin output to the console (ie part of Johan Myreens
general latin-1 patches: the keyboard patches aren't there)
- other minor bug-fixes (thanks to HH Bergman for noticing the
timer-table bug)
Things I haven't had time to look into yet:
- select still has some problems
- reports that VC-output sometimes isdiscarded (never seen it myself)
- probably other things I've simply forgot...
Linus
|
|
This is the promised patch to 0.95a, which hopefully corrects some of
the problems encountered. This is /not/ an offical new release: it's
just a set of patches to get the same kernel I am currently running.
Bugfixes:
- extended partitions should finally work correctly (this release also
contains code for the hd-ioctl call, needed for fdisk). Code mostly
by hedrick.
- I corrected my original ptrace-fix (writing a long word to another
process' data space could fail with my original patches)
- 387-emulation bug with the instructions "fcom[p] %st(x)" which
resulted in bad results on non-387 machines with newer versions of
gcc. The emulation is still ugly, but it seems to work.
- the cooked mode deletion/linekill bugs should be fixed.
- various error-returns were wrong: I correted some of them (thanks to
bruce evans who pointed them out). The bad error-values resulted in
incorrect or spurious error-messages from 'rm' etc.
- various minor fixes (including some in the hd-driver: this might help
persons with unexpected-interrupt and/or timeout errors)
Additionally this version contains VFS-code from entropy, and a
readdir() system call needed for the VFS. The latter was inspired by
patches sent by Remy Card, who did it with a getdirents sys-call. My
version is slightly simpler, but is probably slower. Things might yet
change.
The installation has also changed slightly: the keyboard type and
math-emulation are specified in the main Makefile. That one also
contains the -fcombine-regs flag needed for 1.40. The other makefiles
should no longer need editing.
I've also incorporated the ps095 kernel patches: to get the actual
user-level stuff you still have to get the ps-distribution. Printer
ports /still/ aren't in there, but this time I positively /promise/ to
put it in next week. Really.
People who have been patching their kernel might have problems getting
this patch to work: it was made against a clean 0.95a kernel. I'll
consider a patched-up kernel version 0.95c - and I'd appreciate if
future patches to me would be sent against this version. I'll still
accept older patches, or course.
Linus
|
|
I just uploaded the new kernel source and image to nic.funet.fi into the
incoming-directory under linux. As usual, they won't show up for a day
or two: wait for arl to announce that it's available.
The new version called 0.95a has no major new features, and is just a
bug-fix release for 0.95 - it hopefully fixes all known bugs, but that's
what I thought about plain 0.95 :(. There are even less installation
documents than before: (a) they haven't changed since 0.95 and (b) the
rootdisk is no longer made by me (which means that 0.95a will probably
be the first release that actually has all the needed device special
files there.)
Everyone's favourite bug is also fixed: 0.95a actually returns the
correct version number from uname(). (Boy did I get bug reports on this
one :^)
I'm including the release-note at the end of the post.
Linus
PS: Whoever made the GNU-emacs binary available for linux - the
inability to use the "meta-X shell" command is a bit disturbing. I
looked into it a bit, and my guess is that the linux config file doesn't
define HAVE_SETSID. Could somebody with more diskspace than I have try
to recompile gemacs with HAVE_SETSID defined, and tell me if this fixes
the problem?
==========
RELEASE NOTES FOR LINUX v0.95a
Linus Torvalds, March 17, 1992
This is file mostly contains info on changed features of Linux, and
using old versions as a help-reference might be a good idea.
COPYRIGHT
Linux-0.95a is NOT public domain software, but is copyrighted by me. The
copyright conditions are the same as those imposed by the GNU copyleft:
get a copy of the GNU copyleft at any major ftp-site (if it carries
linux, it probably carries a lot of GNU software anyway, and they all
contain the copyright).
The copyleft is pretty detailed, but it mostly just means that you may
freely copy linux for your own use, and redistribute all/parts of it, as
long as you make source available (not necessarily in the same
distribution, but you make it clear how people can get it for nothing
more than copying costs). Any changes you make that you distribute will
also automatically fall under the GNU copyleft.
NOTE! The linux unistd library-functions (the low-level interface to
linux: system calls etc) are excempt from the copyright - you may use
them as you wish, and using those in your binary files won't mean that
your files are automatically under the GNU copyleft. This concerns
/only/ the unistd-library and those (few) other library functions I have
written: most of the rest of the library has it's own copyrights (or is
public domain). See the library sources for details of those.
NEW FEATURES OF 0.95a
0.95a is mainly a bug-fix release: it didn't even get it's own version
number. Plain 0.95 fixed a lot of bugs in 0.12, but also introduced
totally new bugs: 0.95a tries to correct these. The bugs corrected
(knock wood) are:
- floppy and harddisk drivers should now once more work with most
hardware: I'd be interested in reports of "unexpected HD interrupt"
and "reset-floppy called" with the new kernel.
- A rather serious tty-bug corrected: this one messed up the screen
under 0.95, and switched characters over the serial lines. Under
extreme circumstances it could even crash the machine.
- ptrace had a bug: hopefully it works now.
- The extended partitions didn't work under 0.95, although most of the
code was there. Please somebody tell me it works under 0.95a.
- the 0.95 fdisk was broken: a new one with the new root-floppy should
clear up the confusion.
- select() and the sleep-wakeup code had fundamental (but relatively
benign) problems under 0.95 (and all earlier versions). The sleeping
code is totally redesigned, and select should work better even under
load.
One actual new feature, not just a bug-fix:
- ser3-4 support is there, although I've been unable to test it (as I
haven't got more than ser2). NOTE! Due to AT hardware limitations,
ser1 cannot be active at the same time as ser3, and likewise ser2 and
ser4 are mutually exclusive. The interrupt-handlers should have no
problems with shared interrupts, but the actual hardware probably has,
so the kernel disables interrupts from one serial line when the other
one is opened.
- faster default keyrepeat rate: this is going to need some getting used
to, but is extremely practical especially with bigger screen sizes.
- VGA cards that aren't recognized at bootup are put into the 80x50
character mode if <enter> was pressed when asking about SVGA modes.
NEW FEATURES OF 0.95
Init/login
Yeah, thanks to poe (Peter Orbaeck (sp?)), linux now boots up like a
real unix with a login-prompt. Login as root (no passwd), and change
your /etc/passwd to your hearts delight (and add other logins in
/etc/inittab etc).
Virtual consoles on any (?) hardware.
You can select one of several consoles by pressing the left alt-key and
a function key at the same time. Linux should report the number of
virtual consoles available upon bootup. /dev/tty0 is now "the current"
screen, /dev/tty1 is the main console, and /dev/tty2-8 can exist
depending on your text-mode or card.
The virtual consoles also have some new screen-handling commands: they
confirm even better to vt200 control codes than 0.11. Special graphic
characters etc: you can well use them as terminals to VMS (although
that's a shameful waste of resources), and the PF1-4 keys work somewhat
in the application-key mode.
Extended vt200 emulation
0.95 contains code to handle a vt200 application keymap mode: the cursor
keys send slightly different codes when in application mode, and the
numeric keyboard tries to emulate the vt200 application keys. This
probably isn't complete yet.
Symbolic links.
0.95 now allows symlinks to point to other symlinks etc (the maximum
depth is a rather arbitrary 5 links). 0.12 didn't like more than one
level of indirection.
Virtual memory.
VM under 0.95 should be better than under 0.12: no more lockups (as far
as I have seen), and you can now swap to the filesystem as well as to a
special partition. There are two programs to handle this: mkswap to set
up a swap-file/partition and swapon to start up swapping.
mkswap needs either a partition or a file that already exists to make a
swap-area. To make a swap-file, do this:
# dd bs=1024 count=NN if=/dev/hda of=swapfile
# mkswap swapfile NN
The first command just makes a file that is NN blocks long (initializing
it from /dev/hda, but that could be anything). The second command then
writes the necessary setup-info into the file. To start swapping, write
# swapon swapfile
NOTE! 'dd' isn't on the rootdisk: you have to install some things onto
the harddisk before you can get up and running.
NOTE2! When linux runs totally out of virtual memory, things slow down
dramatically. It tries to keep on running as long as it can, but at
least it shouldn't lock up any more. ^C should work, although you might
have to wait a while for it..
Faster floppies
Ok, you don't notice this much when booting up from a floppy: bash has
grown, so it takes longer to load, and the optimizations work mostly
with sequential accesses. When you start un-taring floppies to get the
programs onto your harddisk, you'll notice that it's much faster now.
That should be about the only use for floppies under a unix: nobody in
their right mind uses floppies as filesystems.
Better FS-independence
Hopefully you'll never even notice this, but the filesystem has been
partly rewritten to make it less minix-fs-specific. I haven't
implemented all the VFS-patches I got, so it's still not ready, but it's
getting there, slowly.
And that's it, I think.
Happy hacking.
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
|
|
All right: it's three days late, but finally 0.95 has been sent to
nic.funet.fi. As usual, it will probably take a few days to find it's
way into a readable directory, so don't start ftp'ing right now. I'm
sure arl will inform people when it's available.
I'm also pretty sure there will be problems setting things up again:
some things have changed, and the docs are up to their usual wonderful
standard. For people that have used 0.12, there shouldn't be too many
surprises, although the new harddisk names/numbers can be confusing.
Many bugs have been corrected, but there are probably new ones that have
taken their place.
One bad thing with the new setup (which will confuse new users) is that
the rootdisk finally got too small for everything, and compress+tar
aren't on the disk any more. Talk about confusing, but if you have 0.12
installed on your system, everything should be mostly a case of "boot
from floppy, drop in the new things, and reboot with the harddisk".
Re: patches. There were 5 major patches (VC's, VFS, swapon, ptrace and
faster floppies) that were installed, and of these only ptrace and VC's
got installed without any major changes (pmacdona has had three releases
to learn my coding style, and it seems to have paid off :). The other
patches are so heavily edited as to be totally unrecognizeable, and I
expect my changes weren't always for the better: but I'd rather be
over-conservative than use a patch even if it's great. I expect they
will still have to be edited, and hope none of the authors mind me
changing their code heavily (sorry also to all those that have used the
VFS routines: they'll have to wait for the next release before getting
all the functionality in the alpha-VFS patches.)
Re: recompiling the kernel. I've used most of the last week to make the
kernel compileable by gcc-2, as that is what I use now. The bootimage
I've made available is compiled totally with 2.0, and the source-files
are set up for that compiler. For people without gcc-2, the kernel can
still be compiled with 1.40, but you'll have to add the flag
-fcombine-regs to some makefiles (without it gcc-1.40 runs out of
registers, and aborts).
I'm including the file RELNOTES-0.95, which is just the old 0.12
RELNOTES edited for a new release. I'm lazy.
Linus
==============================
RELEASE NOTES FOR LINUX v0.95
Linus Torvalds, March 7, 1992
This is file mostly contains info on changed features of Linux, and
using old versions as a help-reference might be a good idea.
COPYRIGHT
Linux-0.95 is NOT public domain software, but is copyrighted by me. The
copyright conditions are the same as those imposed by the GNU copyleft:
get a copy of the GNU copyleft at any major ftp-site (if it carries
linux, it probably carries a lot of GNU software anyway, and they all
contain the copyright).
The copyleft is pretty detailed, but it mostly just means that you may
freely copy linux for your own use, and redistribute all/parts of it, as
long as you make source available (not necessarily in the same
distribution, but you make it clear how people can get it for nothing
more than copying costs). Any changes you make that you distribute will
also automatically fall under the GNU copyleft.
NOTE! The linux unistd library-functions (the low-level interface to
linux: system calls etc) are excempt from the copyright - you may use
them as you wish, and using those in your binary files won't mean that
your files are automatically under the GNU copyleft. This concerns
/only/ the unistd-library and those (few) other library functions I have
written: most of the rest of the library has it's own copyrights (or is
public domain). See the library sources for details of those.
INSTALLATION
This is a SHORT install-note. The installation is very similar to 0.11
and 0.12, so you should read INSTALL-0.11 too. There are a couple of
programs you will need to install linux: something that writes disk
images (rawrite.exe or NU or...) and something that can create harddisk
partitions (fdisk under xenix or older versions of dos, edpart.exe or
something like that).
NOTE! Repartitioning your harddisk will destroy all data on it (well,
not exactly, but if you know enough to get back the data you probably
didn't need this warning). So be careful.
READ THIS THROUGH, THEN READ INSTALL-0.11, AND IF YOU ARE SURE YOU KNOW
WHAT YOU ARE DOING, CONTINUE. OTHERWISE, PANIC. OR WRITE ME FOR
EXPLANATIONS. OR DO ANYTHING BUT INSTALL LINUX - IT'S VERY SIMPLE, BUT
IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING YOU'LL PROBABLY BE SORRY. I'D
RATHER ANSWER A FEW UNNECESSARY MAILS THAN GET MAIL SAYING "YOU KILLED
MY HARDDISK, BASTARD. I'M GOING TO FIND YOU, AND YOU'LL BE SORRY WHEN I
DO".
Minumum files needed:
RELNOTES-0.95 (this file)
INSTALL-0.11 (+ any other docs you might find: the FAQ etc)
bootimage-0.96.Z
rootimage-0.95.Z
rootimage-0.12.Z (for tar+compress)
rawrite.exe
some disk partitioner
1) back up everything you have on your harddisk - linux-0.95 is still in
beta and might do weird things. The only thing I guarantee is that
it has worked fine on /my/ machine - for all I know it might eat your
harddisk and spit it out in small pieces on any other hardware.
2) Test out the linux boot-disk with the root file system. If it
doesn't work, check the hardware requirements, and mail me if you
still think it should work. I might not be able to help you, but
your bug-report would still be appreciated.
Linux-0.95 now has an init/login: there should be 4 logins started on
the first 4 virtual consoles. Log in as root (no password), and test
it out. Change to the other logins by pressing left-alt + FN[1-4].
Note that booting up with a floppy as root is S..L..O..W.. - the
floppy driver has been optimized for sequential access (backups etc),
and trashes somewhat with demand-loading.
Test that linux can read your harddisk at least partly: run the fdisk
program on the root-disk, and see if it barfs. If it tells you about
any partitions at all, linux can successfully read at least part of
your harddisk.
NOTE! Harddisk device names and numbers have changed between versions
0.12 and 0.95: the new numbering system was needed for the extended
partitions, and a new naming scheme was in order so that people
wouldn't cunfuse the old devices with the new ones.
The new harddisk device names are: /dev/hd followed by an 'a' for the
first drive, or a 'b' for the second one. After that comes the
partition number, 1-4 for the primary partitions, 5- for possible
extended partitions. No number means the complete disk. Like this:
/dev/hda the whole first harddisk (old: /dev/hd0)
/dev/hdb3 partition nr 3 on the second disk (old: /dev/hd8)
3) Make sure that you have a free /primary/ partition. There can be 4
primary partitions per drive: newer DOS fdisks seem to be able to
create only 2 (one primary and one extended). In that case use some
other partitioning software: edpart.exe etc. Linux fdisk currently
only tells you the partition info - it doesn't write to the disk.
Remember to check how big your partition was, as that can be used to
tell which device Linux thinks it is.
NOTE! Linux-0.95 /might/ recognize extended partitions: but the code
for this is utterly untested, as I don't have any of those. Do NOT
use the extended partitions unless you can verify that they are
indeed correctly set up - if my routines are wrong, writing to the
extended partitions might just overwrite some other partition
instead. Not nice.
4) Boot up linux again, fdisk to make sure you now have the new
partition, and use mkfs to make a filesystem on one of the partitions
fdisk reports. Write "mkfs -c /dev/hdX nnn" where X is the device
number reported by linux fdisk, and nnn is the size - also reported
by fdisk. nnn is the size in /blocks/, ie kilobytes. You should be
able to use the size info to determine which partition is represented
by which device name.
5) Mount the new disk partition: "mount /dev/hdX /mnt". Copy over the
root filesystem to the harddisk, eg like this:
# for i in bin dev etc usr tmp
# do
# cp +recursive /$i /mnt
# done
You caanot use just "cp +recursive / /mnt", as that will result in a
loop.
6) Sync the filesystem after you have played around enough, and reboot.
# sync
# lo
(none) login: sync
<wait for it to sync>
ctrl-alt-del
THIS IS IMPORTANT! NEVER EVER FORGET TO SYNC BEFORE KILLING THE MACHINE.
7) Change the bootdisk to understand which partition it should use as a
root filesystem. See INSTALL-0.11: it's still the word at offset
508 into the image. You should be up and running.
8) When you've successfully started up with your harddisk as root, you
can mount the older rootimage (rootimage-0.12) from a floppy, and
copy over any files you find there that weren't on the newer
root-image.
Mounting a floppy is easy: make the directory /floppy, and write:
# mount /dev/PS0 /floppy (if you have a 3.5" drive)
or
# mount /dev/at0 /floppy (for 5.25" floppies)
After that the files can be copied to your harddisk, eg:
# cp /floppy/usr/bin/compress /usr/bin
# ln -s /usr/bin/compress /usr/bin/compress
# cp /floppy/usr/bin/tar.Z /usr/bin
# uncompress /usr/bin/tar.Z
That's it. Now go back and read the INSTALL-0.11, until you are sure you
know what you are doing.
New features of 0.95, in order of appearance
(ie in the order you see them)
Init/login
Yeah, thanks to poe (Peter Orbaeck (sp?)), linux now boots up like a
real unix with a login-prompt. Login as root (no passwd), and change
your /etc/passwd to your hearts delight (and add other logins in
/etc/inittab etc).
Bash is even bigger
It's really a bummer to boot up from floppies: bash takes a long time to
load. Bash is also now so big that I couldn't fit compress and tar onto
the root-floppy: You'll probably want the old rootimage-0.12 just in
order to get tar+compress onto your harddisk. If anybody has pointers
to a simple shell that is freely distributable, it might be a good idea
to use that for the root-diskette.
Especially with a small buffer-cache, things aren't fun. Don't worry:
linux runs much better on a harddisk.
Virtual consoles on any (?) hardware.
You can select one of several consoles by pressing the left alt-key and
a function key at the same time. Linux should report the number of
virtual consoles available upon bootup. /dev/tty0 is now "the current"
screen, /dev/tty1 is the main console, and /dev/tty2-8 can exist
depending on your text-mode or card.
The virtual consoles also have some new screen-handling commands: they
confirm better to vt200 control codes. Special graphic characters, and
the PF1-4 keys work somewhat in the application-key mode.
Symbolic links.
0.95 now allows symlinks to point to other symlinks etc (the maximum
depth is a rather arbitrary 5 links). 0.12 didn't like more than one
level of indirection.
Virtual memory.
VM under 0.95 should be better than under 0.12: no more lockups (as far
as I have seen), and you can now swap to the filesystem as well as to a
special partition. There are two programs to handle this: mkswap to set
up a swap-file/partition and swapon to start up swapping.
mkswap needs either a partition or a file that already exists to make a
swap-area. To make a swap-file, do this:
# dd bs=1024 count=NN if=/dev/hda of=swapfile
# mkswap swapfile NN
The first command just makes a file that is NN blocks long (initializing
it from /dev/hda, but that could be anything). The second command then
writes the necessary setup-info into the file. To start swapping, write
# swapon swapfile
NOTE! 'dd' isn't on the rootdisk: you have to install some things onto
the harddisk before you can get up and running.
NOTE2! When linux runs totally out of virtual memory, things slow down
dramatically. It tries to keep on running as long as it can, but at
least it shouldn't lock up any more. ^C should work, although you might
have to wait a while for it..
Faster floppies
Ok, you don't notice this much when booting up from a floppy: bash has
grown, so it takes longer to load, and the optimizations work mostly
with sequential accesses. When you start un-taring floppies to get the
programs onto your harddisk, you'll notice that it's much faster now.
That should be about the only use for floppies under a unix: nobody in
their right mind uses floppies as filesystems.
Better FS-independence
Hopefully you'll never even notice this, but the filesystem has been
partly rewritten to make it less minix-fs-specific. I haven't
implemented all the VFS-patches I got, so it's still not ready, but it's
getting there, slowly.
And that's it, I think.
Happy hacking.
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
|
|
Ok, the subject says it all. The kernel source and the disk-images are
available on nic.funet.fi, and I'm assuming they will migrate to other
places in a couple of days. There is a RELNOTES-0.12, but installation
is similar to 0.11, so the installinfo in relnotes is pretty minimal.
Note that even users of 0.11 should boot up from floppy first and copy
all the binaries to their proper places on the harddisk partition: fsck,
ls etc have changed with symlinks, and bash (/bin/sh) due to job
control.
Also note that I've decided to change the copyright to have the same set
of rules as the GNU copyleft - I got some mail asking about it, and I
agree. The old copyright still holds for now - I want to make sure none
of the "co-authors" would mind, but I'm pretty sure they won't. It won't
actually change the copyright very much: it's the handling-costs extra
etc.
I'll send some additional files (the complete fileutils, the new library
and libc.a etc) tomorrow.
Linus
<RELNOTES-0.12>
RELEASE NOTES FOR LINUX v0.12
This is file mostly contains info on changed features of Linux, and
using old versions as a help-reference might be a good idea.
COPYRIGHT
The Linux copyright will change: I've had a couple of requests to make
it compatible with the GNU copyleft, removing the "you may not
distribute it for money" condition. I agree. I propose that the
copyright be changed so that it confirms to GNU - pending approval of
the persons who have helped write code. I assume this is going to be no
problem for anybody: If you have grievances ("I wrote that code assuming
the copyright would stay the same") mail me. Otherwise The GNU copyleft
takes effect as of the first of February. If you do not know the gist
of the GNU copyright - read it.
INSTALLATION
This is a SHORT install-note. The installation is very similar to 0.11,
so read that (INSTALL-0.11) too. There are a couple of programs you will
need to install linux: something that writes disk images (rawrite.exe or
NU or...) and something that can create harddisk partitions (fdisk under
xenix or older versions of dos, edpart.exe or something like that).
NOTE! Repartitioning your harddisk will destroy all data on it (well,
not exactly, but if you know enough to get back the data you probably
didn't need this warning). So be careful.
READ THIS THROUGH, THEN READ INSTALL-0.11, AND IF YOU ARE SURE YOU KNOW
WHAT YOU ARE DOING, CONTINUE. OTHERWISE, PANIC. OR WRITE ME FOR
EXPLANATIONS. OR DO ANYTHING BUT INSTALL LINUX - IT'S VERY SIMPLE, BUT
IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING YOU'LL PROBABLY BE SORRY. I'D
RATHER ANSWER A FEW UNNECESSARY MAILS THAN GET MAIL SAYING "YOU KILLED
MY HARDDISK, BASTARD. I'M GOING TO FIND YOU, AND YOU'LL BE SORRY WHEN I
DO".
1) back up everything you have on your harddisk - linux-0.12 is still in
beta and might do weird things. The only thing I guarantee is that
it has worked fine on /my/ machine - for all I know it might eat your
harddisk and spit it out in small pieces on any other hardware.
2) Test out the linux boot-disk with the root file system. If it
doesn't work, check the hardware requirements, and mail me if you
still think it should work. I might not be able to help you, but
your bug-report would still be appreciated.
Test that linux can read your harddisk at least partly: run the fdisk
program on the root-disk, and see if it barfs. If it tells you about
any partitions at all, linux can successfully read at least part of
your harddisk.
3) Make sure that you have a free /primary/ partition. There can be 4
primary partitions per drive: newer DOS fdisks seem to be able to
create only 2 (one primary and one extended). In that case use some
other partitioning software: edpart.exe etc. Linux fdisk currently
only tells you the partition info - it doesn't write to the disk.
Remember to check how big your partition was, as that can be used to
tell which device Linux thinks it is.
4) Boot up linux again, fdisk to make sure you now have the new
partition, and use mkfs to make a filesystem on one of the partitions
fdisk reports. Write "mkfs -c /dev/hdX nnn" where X is the device
number reported by linux fdisk, and nnn is the size - also reported
by fdisk. nnn is the size in /blocks/, ie kilobytes. You should be
able to use the size info to determine which partition is represented
by which device name.
5) Mount the new disk partition: "mount /dev/hdX /user". Copy over the
root filesystem to the harddisk, eg like this:
# for i in bin dev etc usr tmp
# do
# cp +recursive /$i /user
# done
You caanot use just "cp +recursive / /user", as that will result in a
loop.
6) Sync the filesystem after you have played around enough, and reboot.
# sync
<wait for it to sync>
ctrl-alt-del
The folklore says you should do this three times before rebooting:
once should be enough, but I admit I do it three times anyway :) THIS
IS IMPORTANT! NEVER EVER FORGET TO SYNC BEFORE KILLING THE MACHINE.
7) Change the bootdisk to understand which partition it should use as a
root filesystem. See INSTALL-0.11: it's still the word at offset
508 into the image. You should be up and running.
That's it. Go back and read the INSTALL-0.11
New features of 0.12, in order of appearance
(ie in the order you see them)
Linux now prints cute dots when loading
WoW. Run, don't walk, to see this :). Seriously, it should hopefully now
load even on machines that never got off the ground before, but
otherwise the loading hasn't changed. Implemented by drew.
Super-VGA detection for extended alphamun modes
I cannot guarantee it, I didn't write it, but it works great on a ET400
SVGA card. I'm addicted to the new look with 100x40 character editing,
instead of a cramped 80x25. This only works on VGA-cards that support
higher text-resolutions, and which are correctly identified. Implemented
by d88-man.
Job Control.
Ok, everybody used to typing ^Z after they started a long command, and
forgot to put it in the background - now it works on linux too. Bash
knows the usualy job-control commands: bg, fg, jobs & kill. I hope
there will be no nasty surprises. Job control was implemented by
tytso@athena.mit.edu.
Virtual consoles on EGA/VGA screens.
You can select one of several consoles by pressing the left alt-key and
a function key at the same time. Linux should report the number of
virtual consoles available upon bootup. /dev/tty0 is now "the current"
screen, /dev/tty1 is the main console, and /dev/tty2-8 can exist
depending on your text-mode or card.
NOTE! Scrolling is noticeably much slower with virtual consoles on a
EGA/VGA. The reason is that no longer does linux use all the screen
memory as a long buffer, but crams in several consoles in it. I think
it's worth it.
The virtual consoles also have some new screen-handling commands: they
confirm even better to vt200 control codes than 0.11. Special graphic
characters etc: you can well use them as terminals to VMS (although
that's a shameful waste of resources).
pty's
Ok. I have to admit that I didn't get the hangup-code working correctly,
but that should be easy to add. The general things are there.
select
I've never used it, so I cannot say how well it works. My minor testing
seems to indicate that it works ok. vc's, pty's and select were
implemented by pmacdona, although I hacked it heavily.
387-emulation.
It's not complete, but it works well enough to run those gcc2.0 compiled
programs I tested (few). None of the "heavy" math-functions are
implemented yet.
Symbolic links.
Try out a few "ln -s xx yy", and ls -l. Note that I think tar should be
recompiled to know anout them, and probably some other programs too. The
0.12 rootimage-disk has most of the recompiled fileutilities.
Virtual memory.
In addition to the "mkfs" program, there is now a "mkswap" program on
the root disk. The syntax is identical: "mkswap -c /dev/hdX nnn", and
again: this writes over the partition, so be careful. Swapping can then
be enabled by changing the word at offset 506 in the bootimage to the
desired device. Use the same program as for setting the root file
system (but change the 508 offset to 506 of course).
NOTE! This has been tested by Robert Blum, who has a 2M machine, and it
allows you to run gcc without much memory. HOWEVER, I had to stop using
it, as my diskspace was eaten up by the beta-gcc-2.0, so I'd like to
hear that it still works: I've been totally unable to make a
swap-partition for even rudimentary testing since about christmastime.
Thus the new changes could possibly just have backfired on the VM, but I
doubt it.
And that's it, I think.
Happy hacking.
Linus
|
|
The subject says it all: I have uploaded linux version 0.11 to
nic.funet.fi and tupac-amaru. They won't show up for a while on nic,
but are already visible in pub/msdos/replace/incoming at amaru. rtx-11
is so slow to use from here that I didn't upload them there: I guess
they'll show up within a couple of days (tytso?).
The files uploaded were:
bootimage.Z - US keyboard compressed bootimage
rootimage.Z - 1200kB compressed root image
linux-0.11.tar.Z - sources
as86.tar.Z - linux binaries for bruce evans'
16-bit assembler and loader.
INSTALL-0.11 - updated install-info
This version has a lot of corrections, and is stable at least on my
machine. I /hope/ every known bug is fixed, but no promises (and all
unknown bugs are still there, probably with reinforcements ;-). Those
who like to use caps lock as a ctrl-key, you'll have to re-patch the
kernel. It's not implemented in the standard version.
Linus
PS. I'll be a bit busy with the #"$/% physics-course I'm taking, so I
might not be as active on the net this coming week as I would like to.
PPS. corsini: the problem you have with the recompiled uemacs sounds
like it isn't resetting the ISIG bit in c_lflags when moving to raw
mode. Search for c_lflags in the source: it should effectively be set to
zero (I think) - no signals, no canonical mode etc.
<INSTALL-0.11>
Using Linux v0.11
Linus Torvalds 08.12.91
NOTE: Users of 0.10, please check the "changed" list before using 0.11.
Booting linux
Linux-0.11 can easily be booted by getting the 2 files bootimage-0.11.Z
and rootimage-0.11.Z from the linux archive, uncompressing them and
writing them out to disks of the same size (ie 2 1.44M floppies or 2
1.2M floppies). Writing the disks is done with the "rawrite.exe" program
from dos, or with "dd" from unix. Linux is then booted simply by
inserting the bootdiskette in drive A, and rebooting the machine. If
everything goes well, linux will ask you to insert the root-disk after
loading the system. Hopefully linux will then correctly load the shell
executable, and leave you as root on the new system (prompt '# ').
Using it.
You can get a complete list of available commands by pressing <tab>
twice: the root-disk contains mostly setup-programs needed to install
the system on a harddisk. You can test them a bit, reading directories
etc.
In order to install linux on the harddisk, first check out your harddisk
by executing the command "fdisk" - it should show you all the partitions
available. If you have only 1 AT-harddisk, you should get a
errormessage, just ignore it. At my system fdisk reports the following:
/dev/hd1: 20476 blocks minix
/dev/hd2: 19975 blocks minix
/dev/hd3: 1020 blocks minix
/dev/hd4: 170 blocks active 16-bit DOS (>=32M)
/dev/hd6: 41641 blocks active minix
The partition type given (12-bit DOS, minix etc) doesn{t really mean
anything, unless it's a "extended partition", in which case you
shouldn't use that partition for anything: linux doesn't yet understand
them. When later using "mkfs" to make a linux file system, it won't
change the output of fdisk, so fdisk may well report "DOS", while in
fact you have made it a linux partition.
If fdisk doesn't print out anything but errors, linux is unable to read
your harddisk, and you are f**ked. Play around with the floppy version,
but you won't be able to do anything real.
Making a filesystem
In order to really use linux, you will have to make a filesystem on your
harddisk. This starts by deciding which partition you can use. Look
again at what fdisk reports, and try to figure out which of the
partitions you are using for DOS, OS/2 etc. /dev/hdX where X={1,2,3,4}
always refers to the first harddisk, X={6,7,8,9} always refers to the
second disk. /dev/hd0 and /dev/hd5 are special: they are all of the
drive, and mkfs will refuse to use them for a filesystem.
When you are certain you know which device points to which partition,
you make a filesystem on the partition of your choice by writing:
mkfs -c /dev/hdX blocks
where "-c" means that you want mkfs to check for errors, "dev/hdX" is
the free partition you intend to use for linux, and "blocks" is the
number of blocks fdisk reports for that particular partition. NOTE! mkfs
will overwrite the partition you selected, so be doubly (or triply) sure
that you don't mind that.
Note that when using the "-c" flag, mkfs will read through the entire
partition: this can take some time. If there are read errors, mkfs will
mark the particular block as bad, and continue: linux will also print a
little message "harddisk I/O error". After running mkfs these messages
should never occur again: if they do, your data may be corrupted.
Mounting the filesystem
After mkfs has exited, it's time to mount the file-system, and do the
necessary things to make it a root file system. Mount the new filesystem
on /user by writing:
cd /
mount /dev/hdX /user
If you get errors for this, mkfs failed, and there is probably something
seriously wrong.
After mounting the device, you want to move all the files on the current
floppy-root to the new fs. This can most easily be done by writing:
cd /user
for i in bin dev etc usr tmp floppy
do
cp +recursive +verbose /$i $i
done
sync
which will also tell you what it is doing (/bin/sh -> bin/sh etc).
After that, you should have a new filesystem that contains the bare
necessities to start hacking linux. Play around some more, and exit
linux by writing "logout or exit". This should result in
child 4 died with error code 0000
#
Do a couple of syncs (3 is a magic number), and reboot the machine.
ALWAYS remember to sync before rebooting: terrible things happen if you
don't.
Using the harddisk as root
Once you have happily made a new root, you will want to boot up with it.
This is done by changing a word at offset 508 in the boot-image. The
word (in 386-order, ie low byte first) tells the system which device to
use as root: it is initially 0, which means that we want to use a floppy
of the same type as the boot-disk (and this is the reason that you may
not use a 360kB boot-disk even though the system fits on one: it has to
be the same type as the root-diskette).
In order to use the harddisk as root, this value has to be changed to
point to the correct device. Harddisks have a major number of 3 under
linux, and the minor nr is the same as the number X in /dev/hdX. The
complete device number is then calculated with
DEV_NO = (major<<8)+minor
or alternatively major*256+minor. Thus /dev/hd1 is (3<<8)+1 = 0x301,
/dev/hd6 = 0x0306 etc. Assuming the partition you made into the new root
was /dev/hd2, you will have to write 0x0302 into the boot-image. That
is, you should change the 508th byte in the image to 0x02, and the 509th
byte to 0x03. There is a sample program for this in some of the older
INSTALL-notes, if you don't understand what it's all about.
Ok, I got the root on hd, what now?
As you have probably noticed, you cannot get very far with the binaries
found on the original root-diskette. So the first thing you want to do
is to import some new binaries. To do this you need to tell linux what
kind of floppies you have, as that's the easiest way to import things.
As with harddisk, floppies have device numbers, but this time major = 2
instead of 3. The minor number is not as easy: it's a composite that
tells which drive (A, B, C or D) and what type of drive (360kB, 1.2M,
1.44M etc). The formula is 'minor = type*4+nr', where nr is 0-3 for A-D,
and type is 2 for 1.2M disks, and 7 for 1.44M disks. There are other
types, but these should suffice for now.
Thus if you have a 1.2M A-drive, and want to call it "floppy0", you have
to tell linux so. This is done with the "mknod" command. mknod takes 4
paramters: the unix name of the device, a "b" or a "c" depending on
whether it's a Block of Character device, and the major and minor
numbers. Thus to make "floppy0" a 1.2M A-drive, you write:
mknod /dev/floppy0 b 2 8
b is for Block-device, the 2 is for floppy, and the 8 is 4*2+0, where
the 2 is 1.2M-drive and the 0 is drive A. Likewise to make a "floppy1"
device that is a 1.44M drive in B, you write:
mknod /dev/floppy1 b 2 29
where 29 = 4*7 + 1. There are a couple of standard names, for users
that are used to minix (major, minor in parentheses): /dev/PS0 is a
1.44M in A (2,28), /dev/PS1 a 1.44M in B (2,29), /dev/at0 is a 1.2M in A
(2,8), /dev/at1 is a 1.2M in B (2,9). Use mknod to make those that fit
your computer.
After you have made these special block devices, you can now read a
floppy under linux. The easiest way to import things into linux is by
writing a tar-file to a floppy with rawrite.exe, and then using:
tar xvf /dev/floppy0
to untar it under linux. This way you can get the gcc binaries etc
available from the linux-carrying sites.
Changes from 0.10:
- /bin/update is no longer automatically executed upon bootup: instead
the file /etc/rc is evaluated by the shell. This file can then start the
update process, mount andy needed filesystems, possibly fsck'ing them
first. A minimal /etc/rc looks like this:
/bin/update &
> /etc/mtab
echo " Ok."
- init() restarts the shell every time it is exited: logout from the
login shell results in a "child xxx died with error code yyy", a sync
and then a new shell as root.
- floppies work a lot better than in 0.10. Even using two floppies at
the same time seems to work out ok. Reading big chunks at a time is also
faster then in 0.10 (I think).
- harddisk errors are handled better. Use the "-c" option in mkfs to map
out all errors.
- linux accepts most video-cards: harcules, MDA, CGA etc seem to work.
- ^G beeps on the console, so command completion under bash etc will
notify of errors.
- sticky directories, corrected handling of uid/gid bits, and better
handling of protections when not root. Most of these won't be noticeable
until we get a init/login.
|
|
[ Committer's note: official announcement and exact release date unknown.
Some posts are included below to narrow the possible release date.
There is a possibility that this version might not be pristine.
Also this commit folds the 0.02 version which is apparently lost. ]
<INSTALL-0.10>
Warning: I have personally not done this the hard way, so I don't know
what problems could surface. In general, this version is still meant
for people with minix: they are more used to the system, and can do some
things that DOS-based persons cannot. If you have only DOS, expect some
troubles. As the version number suggests, this is still not the final
product.
This is a "fast hack", meant as a minimal guide to what you must do.
I'll expand this as soon as people tell me what they have problems with
etc etc. If somebody who has successfully installed the system wants to
write something better, I'd be delighted. This guide stinks to high
heaven.
Installing Linux-0.10 on your system
There are 5 major steps in installing linux on your system:
1 - BACK UP ANY IMPORTANT DATA. Linux accesses your hardware directly,
and if your hardware differs from mine, you could be in for a nasty
surprise. Doublecheck that your hardware is compatible: AT style
harddisk, VGA controller. (If somebody has EGA, please tell me if the
screen driver should happen to work)
2 - Make a file-system on your harddisk. This is easy if you have
minix, but if you haven't got minix, you'll have to get the minix
demo-disk from somewhere (plains.nodak.edu is one place), and use that.
There should be a manual accompanying the demo-disk, and you had better
read that carefully. Although this version of linux will boot up
without minix, a knowledge of minix would help. Especially if you have
never done any unix work, you'll be very confused.
Making a filesystem means getting a empty partition (with DOS fdisk or
similar), and using the 'mkfs /dev/hdX nnn' command to write out a empty
file-system.
3 - copy the diskimages to two floppies. Again, under minix (or any
unix), this is easy, as you can just do a simple 'dd' to a floppy, but
from within MS-DOS this might be a bit trickier. 'debug' should be able
to write diskettes directly, or you could get the sources to "raw-write"
from the same place as you got the minix demo disk, and modify them to
write out any disk image (or do they do that already?).
NOTE! The floppies MUST be of the same type: even though the boot-image
will fit nicely on a 360kB floppy, you have to write it to the same type
of floppy as the root-image. That means a 1.2M or 1.44M floppy. The
reason is that the floppy-type is determined at boot-time from the
boot-floppy. Thus the same binary works on both 3.5" and 5.25" drives.
4 - boot up from floppy. This should be obvious. Having a floppy as
root-device isn't very fast (especially on a machine with less than 6MB
total ram -> small buffer cache), but it works (I hope). Test the
programs on the root-floppy (cat mkdir etc).
5 - Mount the harddisk partition (I do it on /user: ie
'mount /dev/hdX /user'), and copy the file system over to the new
partition. The following is a example of how to do this:
$ cd /user
$ mkdir usr
$ for i in bin etc usr/bin usr/root mtools
> do
> mkdir $i
> cp `ls -A /$i` $i
> done
$ mkdir dev
$ cd dev
$ for i in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
> do
> mknod 'hd'$i b 3 $i
> done
$ mknod tty c 5 0
$ mknod tty0 c 4 0
$ mknod tty1 c 4 1
$ mknod tty2 c 4 2
You should now have a filesystem you could boot from. Play around a bit,
try to get aquainted with the new system. Log out when you've had
enough.
6 - Changing the boot-diskette use your new harddisk partition as root.
The root device to be used for linux is encoded in a word at offset 508
in the boot image. Normally this is 0, meaning that the root is to be
the same type of floppy as was used in the boot process. This can be
changed to whatever you like.
Use a short program like the one at the end to change the word (I assume
everybody has access to some kind of C compiler, be it under dos or
unix). You can then write out the new bootdisk, and boot from it, now
using the harddisk as root (much faster). Once you have successfully
done that you might want to install additional programs (gcc etc) by
reading them from a dos-floppy with 'mcopy'.
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
------ example program: use 'a.out < oldboot > newboot' ----
#include <unistd.h>
char tmp[512];
void main(void)
{
int i;
if (512 != read(0,tmp,512))
exit(1);
if (0xAA55 != *((unsigned short *)(tmp+510)))
exit(2);
*((unsigned short *)(tmp+508)) = NEW_DEV;
if (512 != write(1,tmp,512))
exit(3);
while ((i=read(0,tmp,512)) > 0)
if (i != write(1,tmp,i))
exit(4);
exit(0);
}
-------
Devices:
Harddisks:
0x301 - /dev/hd1 - first partition on first drive
...
0x304 - /dev/hd2 - fourth partition on first drive
0x306 - /dev/hd1 - first partition on second drive
...
0x309 - /dev/hd2 - fourth partition on second drive
0x300 - /dev/hd0 - the whole first drive. BE CAREFUL
0x305 - /dev/hd5 - the whole second drive. BE CAREFUL
Floppies:
0x208 - 1.2M in A
0x209 - 1.2M in B
0x21C - 1.44M in A
0x21D - 1.44M in B
-----
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT
Keywords: 386, preliminary version
Message-ID: <1991Oct5.054106.4647@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 5 Oct 91 05:41:06 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote
their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying
to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you
finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-
nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just
for you :-)
As I mentioned a month(?) ago, I'm working on a free version of a
minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers. It has finally reached the stage
where it's even usable (though may not be depending on what you want),
and I am willing to put out the sources for wider distribution. It is
just version 0.02 (+1 (very small) patch already), but I've successfully
run bash/gcc/gnu-make/gnu-sed/compress etc under it.
Sources for this pet project of mine can be found at nic.funet.fi
(128.214.6.100) in the directory /pub/OS/Linux. The directory also
contains some README-file and a couple of binaries to work under linux
(bash, update and gcc, what more can you ask for :-). Full kernel
source is provided, as no minix code has been used. Library sources are
only partially free, so that cannot be distributed currently. The
system is able to compile "as-is" and has been known to work. Heh.
Sources to the binaries (bash and gcc) can be found at the same place in
/pub/gnu.
ALERT! WARNING! NOTE! These sources still need minix-386 to be compiled
(and gcc-1.40, possibly 1.37.1, haven't tested), and you need minix to
set it up if you want to run it, so it is not yet a standalone system
for those of you without minix. I'm working on it. You also need to be
something of a hacker to set it up (?), so for those hoping for an
alternative to minix-386, please ignore me. It is currently meant for
hackers interested in operating systems and 386's with access to minix.
The system needs an AT-compatible harddisk (IDE is fine) and EGA/VGA. If
you are still interested, please ftp the README/RELNOTES, and/or mail me
for additional info.
I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be
out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got
minix. This is a program for hackers by a hacker. I've enjouyed doing
it, and somebody might enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for
their own needs. It is still small enough to understand, use and
modify, and I'm looking forward to any comments you might have.
I'm also interested in hearing from anybody who has written any of the
utilities/library functions for minix. If your efforts are freely
distributable (under copyright or even public domain), I'd like to hear
from you, so I can add them to the system. I'm using Earl Chews estdio
right now (thanks for a nice and working system Earl), and similar works
will be very wellcome. Your (C)'s will of course be left intact. Drop me
a line if you are willing to let me use your code.
Linus
-----
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: [comp.os.minix] Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT
Summary: Still only ftp
Message-ID: <1991Oct31.101252.13981@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 31 Oct 91 10:12:52 GMT
References: <3255@cluster.cs.su.oz.au> <AA7ig3fuR5@inzer.demos.su>
Organization: University of Helsinki
In article <AA7ig3fuR5@inzer.demos.su> moroz@inzer.demos.su writes:
>chrisa@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU (C. G. Albone) writes:
>>Hello all..
>> I missed the original posting, so could someone please tell me
>>how I may obtain the sources.
> And me too !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
> Also, are them available via e-mail (mail server or smth), as I'm
>in the former Soviet Union and can't do any FTP.
Ok, as I've gotten quite a few questions, I guess I'd better follow up
again.
Linux is currently ONLY available via ftp from nic.funet.fi, directory
/pub/OS/Linux. As the sources change rather rapidly (next release due
out this weekend after I have tested some more), it is also currently
impractical to make them available from other places. There is a
mail-server possibility fron nic, but I think it's still in testing (you
could try mailing "mailserver@nic.funet.fi" with "help" in the body,
but I don't know if it will work).
Linux is a full kernel that has so far worked on a number (5-10?) of
at-386 (and one 486 as far as I know). It supports GNU cc (gcc), bash
and some other free stuff. It is currently more of a hackers kernel (and
minix-386 is needed, but that will change with this weeks release), and
the current version number is 0.03 (next is 0.10 I think).
Good things about linux:
- it's free, full source, and I try to correct bugs you find.
- it's a bit faster than minix, I think.
- uses paging for memory management (not to disk yet)
- multithreaded fs (but then you can get patches to minix that do
similar stuff)
- mostly full termios and vt100-console.
- most things easy to port (easier than to minix).
Bad points:
- ONLY 386/486
- early versions: there might be lots of bugs, and you might need to
port/hack things to work.
- minix is recommended even for the upcoming version that doesn't
absolutely need it.
- currently only VGA (EGA?) support, limited keyboard drivers (US and
Finnish) etc
You can mail me for more info. "finger torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi"
might tell you something too.
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
-----
Date: Thu, 7 Nov 91 14:19:23 -0500
To: linux-activists-mtg@tsx-11.MIT.EDU
From: Robert Lund <rml@bighorn.uswest.com>
Reply-To: tytso@Athena.MIT.EDU
Hello,
I have installed Linux 0.10 using the minix demo to build the root
file system on a hd partition. I couldn't figure out how to use the
mtools commands to get gccbin, utils, etc. from DOS to linux but I did
discover an alternate approach that might prove useful to others.
I happen to have a 1.44 drive as my A drive so ubder linux I did
mknod /dev/PS0 B 2 28
Next, I formated a 1.44 floppy under DOS.
Then, I uncompressed the tar files that I wanted to get from DOS to linux
(I actually uncompressed under UNIX but I assume that a 16 bit uncompress
utility under DOS would work).
Then, I used the rawrite command available with the minix demo to dump a tar
file, e.g. gccbin.tar, to the 1.44 floppy in the A drive (back under DOS
again)
Next, I booted Linux and did
tar -xvf /dev/PS0
and lo and behold, it worked; tar read the raw device and
successfully extracted the files.
Hope this helps someone.
Bob Lund
|
|
1. Short intro
This is a free minix-like kernel for i386(+) based AT-machines. Full
source is included, and this source has been used to produce a running
kernel on two different machines. Currently there are no kernel
binaries for public viewing, as they have to be recompiled for different
machines. You need to compile it with gcc (I use 1.40, don't know if
1.37.1 will handle all __asm__-directives), after having changed the
relevant configuration file(s).
As the version number (0.01) suggests this is not a mature product.
Currently only a subset of AT-hardware is supported (hard-disk, screen,
keyboard and serial lines), and some of the system calls are not yet
fully implemented (notably mount/umount aren't even implemented). See
comments or readme's in the code.
This version is also meant mostly for reading - ie if you are interested
in how the system looks like currently. It will compile and produce a
working kernel, and though I will help in any way I can to get it
working on your machine (mail me), it isn't really supported. Changes
are frequent, and the first "production" version will probably differ
wildly from this pre-alpha-release.
Hardware needed for running linux:
- 386 AT
- VGA/EGA screen
- AT-type harddisk controller (IDE is fine)
- Finnish keyboard (oh, you can use a US keyboard, but not
without some practise :-)
The Finnish keyboard is hard-wired, and as I don't have a US one I
cannot change it without major problems. See kernel/keyboard.s for
details. If anybody is willing to make an even partial port, I'd be
grateful. Shouldn't be too hard, as it's tabledriven (it's assembler
though, so ...)
Although linux is a complete kernel, and uses no code from minix or
other sources, almost none of the support routines have yet been coded.
Thus you currently need minix to bootstrap the system. It might be
possible to use the free minix demo-disk to make a filesystem and run
linux without having minix, but I don't know...
2. Copyrights etc
This kernel is (C) 1991 Linus Torvalds, but all or part of it may be
redistributed provided you do the following:
- Full source must be available (and free), if not with the
distribution then at least on asking for it.
- Copyright notices must be intact. (In fact, if you distribute
only parts of it you may have to add copyrights, as there aren't
(C)'s in all files.) Small partial excerpts may be copied
without bothering with copyrights.
- You may not distibute this for a fee, not even "handling"
costs.
Mail me at "torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi" if you have any questions.
Sadly, a kernel by itself gets you nowhere. To get a working system you
need a shell, compilers, a library etc. These are separate parts and may
be under a stricter (or even looser) copyright. Most of the tools used
with linux are GNU software and are under the GNU copyleft. These tools
aren't in the distribution - ask me (or GNU) for more info.
3. Short technical overview of the kernel.
The linux kernel has been made under minix, and it was my original idea
to make it binary compatible with minix. That was dropped, as the
differences got bigger, but the system still resembles minix a great
deal. Some of the key points are:
- Efficient use of the possibilities offered by the 386 chip.
Minix was written on a 8088, and later ported to other
machines - linux takes full advantage of the 386 (which is
nice if you /have/ a 386, but makes porting very difficult)
- No message passing, this is a more traditional approach to
unix. System calls are just that - calls. This might or might
not be faster, but it does mean we can dispense with some of
the problems with messages (message queues etc). Of course, we
also miss the nice features :-p.
- Multithreaded FS - a direct consequence of not using messages.
This makes the filesystem a bit (a lot) more complicated, but
much nicer. Coupled with a better scheduler, this means that
you can actually run several processes concurrently without
the performance hit induced by minix.
- Minimal task switching. This too is a consequence of not using
messages. We task switch only when we really want to switch
tasks - unlike minix which task-switches whatever you do. This
means we can more easily implement 387 support (indeed this is
already mostly implemented)
- Interrupts aren't hidden. Some people (among them Tanenbaum)
think interrupts are ugly and should be hidden. Not so IMHO.
Due to practical reasons interrupts must be mainly handled by
machine code, which is a pity, but they are a part of the code
like everything else. Especially device drivers are mostly
interrupt routines - see kernel/hd.c etc.
- There is no distinction between kernel/fs/mm, and they are all
linked into the same heap of code. This has it's good sides as
well as bad. The code isn't as modular as the minix code, but
on the other hand some things are simpler. The different parts
of the kernel are under different sub-directories in the
source tree, but when running everything happens in the same
data/code space.
The guiding line when implementing linux was: get it working fast. I
wanted the kernel simple, yet powerful enough to run most unix software.
The file system I couldn't do much about - it needed to be minix
compatible for practical reasons, and the minix filesystem was simple
enough as it was. The kernel and mm could be simplified, though:
- Just one data structure for tasks. "Real" unices have task
information in several places, I wanted everything in one
place.
- A very simple memory management algorithm, using both the
paging and segmentation capabilities of the i386. Currently
MM is just two files - memory.c and page.s, just a couple of
hundreds of lines of code.
These decisions seem to have worked out well - bugs were easy to spot,
and things work.
4. The "kernel proper"
All the routines handling tasks are in the subdirectory "kernel". These
include things like 'fork' and 'exit' as well as scheduling and minor
system calls like 'getpid' etc. Here are also the handlers for most
exceptions and traps (not page faults, they are in mm), and all
low-level device drivers (get_hd_block, tty_write etc). Currently all
faults lead to a exit with error code 11 (Segmentation fault), and the
system seems to be relatively stable ("crashme" hasn't - yet).
5. Memory management
This is the simplest of all parts, and should need only little changes.
It contains entry-points for some things that the rest of the kernel
needs, but mostly copes on it's own, handling page faults as they
happen. Indeed, the rest of the kernel usually doesn't actively allocate
pages, and just writes into user space, letting mm handle any possible
'page-not-present' errors.
Memory is dealt with in two completely different ways - by paging and
segmentation. First the 386 VM-space (4GB) is divided into a number of
segments (currently 64 segments of 64Mb each), the first of which is the
kernel memory segment, with the complete physical memory identity-mapped
into it. All kernel functions live within this area.
Tasks are then given one segment each, to use as they wish. The paging
mechanism sees to filling the segment with the appropriate pages,
keeping track of any duplicate copies (created at a 'fork'), and making
copies on any write. The rest of the system doesn't need to know about
all this.
6. The file system
As already mentioned, the linux FS is the same as in minix. This makes
crosscompiling from minix easy, and means you can mount a linux
partition from minix (or the other way around as soon as I implement
mount :-). This is only on the logical level though - the actual
routines are very different.
NOTE! Minix-1.6.16 seems to have a new FS, with minor
modifications to the 1.5.10 I've been using. Linux
won't understand the new system.
The main difference is in the fact that minix has a single-threaded
file-system and linux hasn't. Implementing a single-threaded FS is much
easier as you don't need to worry about other processes allocating
buffer blocks etc while you do something else. It also means that you
lose some of the multiprocessing so important to unix.
There are a number of problems (deadlocks/raceconditions) that the linux
kernel needed to address due to multi-threading. One way to inhibit
race-conditions is to lock everything you need, but as this can lead to
unnecessary blocking I decided never to lock any data structures (unless
actually reading or writing to a physical device). This has the nice
property that dead-locks cannot happen.
Sadly it has the not so nice property that race-conditions can happen
almost everywhere. These are handled by double-checking allocations etc
(see fs/buffer.c and fs/inode.c). Not letting the kernel schedule a
task while it is in supervisor mode (standard unix practise), means that
all kernel/fs/mm actions are atomic (not counting interrupts, and we are
careful when writing those) if you don't call 'sleep', so that is one of
the things we can count on.
7. Apologies :-)
This isn't yet the "mother of all operating systems", and anyone who
hoped for that will have to wait for the first real release (1.0), and
even then you might not want to change from minix. This is a source
release for those that are interested in seeing what linux looks like,
and it's not really supported yet. Anyone with questions or suggestions
(even bug-reports if you decide to get it working on your system) is
encouraged to mail me.
8. Getting it working
Most hardware dependancies will have to be compiled into the system, and
there a number of defines in the file "include/linux/config.h" that you
have to change to get a personalized kernel. Also you must uncomment
the right "equ" in the file boot/boot.s, telling the bootup-routine what
kind of device your A-floppy is. After that a simple "make" should make
the file "Image", which you can copy to a floppy (cp Image /dev/PS0 is
what I use with a 1.44Mb floppy). That's it.
Without any programs to run, though, the kernel cannot do anything. You
should find binaries for 'update' and 'bash' at the same place you found
this, which will have to be put into the '/bin' directory on the
specified root-device (specified in config.h). Bash must be found under
the name '/bin/sh', as that's what the kernel currently executes. Happy
hacking.
Linus Torvalds "torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi"
Petersgatan 2 A 2
00140 Helsingfors 14
FINLAND
-----
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Keywords: 386, preferences
Message-ID: <1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things).
I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.
This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and
I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.
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