Disclaimer: Don’t use this kernel unless you know what you are
getting into.
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
Subject: Linux-2.3.15..
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 16:36:10 -0700 (PDT)
To: Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@redhat.com>, Richard Henderson <rth@cygnus.com>, Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>
There’s a rather huge patch-set out there now, taking the 2.3.x
series to 2.3.15.
This has a lot of the merge code I’ve been sent over the last
two weeks, but I will invariably have missed some, if for no other
reason than simply that I got absolutely _flooded_ by people
sending me patches.
One of the more interesting things was the SMP pipe cleanup sent
by Richard, but try as I might it was never really stable under
load on x86 – not with the plain semaphores in 2.3.14, and not with
the patches Andrea had either. I assume Richard tested it on an
alpha with the much more well-thought-out atomic operation that the
alpha provides.
I ended up rewriting the x86 semaphore code (and some of
Richards pipe code too, for that matter, to get rid of some races
in waking things up), and it doesn’t show the problems I saw
before, but hey, maybe I just exchanged one set of problems for
another set that I can’t trigger any more. Give me feedback,
please.
Other features that don’t impact everybody, but are rather
major:
- ATM support merged in
- firewalling is gone (again), replaced by an even more generic
netfilter facility. - general networking merges and updates
- Various driver updates (ISDN, ISA PnP, sound, fbcon, usb,
intelliport, you name it) - make system call return type “long” even if the system call
only returns valid data in the lower order bits – we use the high
bits for error handling, and some 64-bit architectures care (read:
the Merced calling conventions want this because they don’t
automatically extend the return type – I bet it will be a new
portability issue for other programs than just the kernel)
Have fun,
Linus