Linux kernel 2.2.14aa1 released

Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 11:36:35 -0500
From: Andrea Arcangeli andrea@suse.de
To: linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu

The main features of 2.2.14aa1 are:

o        Support for 4Gigabyte of RAM on IA32 (me and Gerhard Wichert)
o        Support for 2048Gigabyte of RAM on alpha (stock 2.2.14 alpha
        limit is of 2Giga of RAM) (me)
o        Improved VM for high end machines with enough ram and doing
        heavy I/O under high memory pressure. (me)
o        RAW-IO (also on bigmem). (Stephen C. Tweedie)
o        sensitive SMP scheduler improvements. (me)

Detailed description of 2.2.14aa1:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
SMP-scheduler-2.2.11-E.gz       -> rewrote of reschedule_idle. (me)
alpha-imb-1.gz                   -> alpha have an icache not coherent
                                with the dcache and it can be
                                also a virtually tagged and
                                virtually indexed cache thus
                                imb is necessary in some place
                                to avoid crashes for example
                                while insmodding modules. (me)
java-proc.gz                    -> revertd the semantic change that
                                make difference between
                                /proc/00000$$ and /proc/$$, this
                                allows backwards compatibilty of
                                a misfeature and it _won't_ hurt
                                security. There's no downside
                                in reverting the 2.2.13 semantic
                                change.
kupdate-sigstop-2.2.11-1.gz     -> allows kupdate to be stopped via
                                SIGSTOP (currently it must be stopped
                                by setting interval to zero via
                                sysctl). (me)
no-swapout-2.2.10-B.gz          -> avoid swapin/swapouts during heavy
                                I/O (strictly necessary for decent
                                performances on very I/O and MM loaded
                                servers). (me)
probe-irq-2.3.14-pre2-1.gz      -> avoid a pending irq to be mistaken
                                for a spurious irq. (me)
rtclight-2.2.14-1.gz             -> necessary for Alpha SMP.
shrink_all_cache-2.2.10-A.gz    -> make sure that big memory boxes will
                                shrink the cache well enough. (me)
trashing-mem-2.2.10-A.gz        -> heuristic to penalize memory hogs,
                                the system will remains responsive
                                also during heavy swapout. (me)
z-bigmem-2.2.14aa1-7.gz          -> bigmem production code (IA32 and
                                alpha). (me and Gerhard Wichert)
z-bigmem-rawio-2.2.14aa1.gz      -> SCT's rawio bigmem capable. (Stephen C.
                                Tweedie)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

As usual all the separate patches are in:

 ftp://ftp.*.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/andrea/kernels/v2.2/2.2.14aa1/

and they can be applyed in order to generate the 2.2.14aa1 kernel.

This time I also provided a whole diff, so if you don't want to bother to
download all single patches you can simply download this patch against
2.2.14:

 ftp://ftp.*.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/andrea/kernels/v2.2/2.2.14aa1.gz

and apply it to go in sync with 2.2.14aa1.

Andrea

PS. If you'll run with more than 4giga of RAM on alpha, you'll need also
to fix procps if you want to read the correct MM values with `free`, `top`
and `vmstat`. procps takes all the memory information with byte
granularity in `int` words (and not long words). I fixed procps this way:

 ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/andrea/procps/procps-2.0.2-bigmem-1.gz