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dsimon
From: dsi...@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Derron Simon)
Newsgroups: alt.os.linux
Subject: Linux 0.13?
Message-ID: <68076@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 1 Mar 92 19:17:54 GMT
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When is version 0.13 scheduled to be released?  I don't want to hassle with
all the patches and updates to 0.12 so I'd like to wait until 0.13 if it is
not going to be long from now.  Thanks,
				Derron

--
/* Derron Simon   (SEAS 1994)  *  Tipsy fuddled boozy groggy elevated /   */
/* dsi...@eniac.seas.upenn.edu *  Prime did edit her / Hellborn elfchild  */
/*                             *  roadhog mountain fortune hunter / Man   */
/* University of Pennsylvania  *  beheader her - Fluff's Travels (Phish)  */

Path: sparky!uunet!mcsun!news.funet.fi!hydra!klaava!torvalds
From: torva...@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: alt.os.linux
Subject: Re: Linux 0.13?
Message-ID: <1992Mar2.013147.5599@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 2 Mar 92 01:31:47 GMT
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In article <6...@netnews.upenn.edu> dsi...@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Derron Simon) writes:
>When is version 0.13 scheduled to be released?  I don't want to hassle with
>all the patches and updates to 0.12 so I'd like to wait until 0.13 if it is
>not going to be long from now.

I'm putting in the finishing touches this week: 0.13 should be out next
weekend at the latest (unless some new bug shows up), and I hope to get
it ready by Thursday. I'll definitely call it 0.95, making clear that
version 1.0 isn't that far away.

0.95 will have these features:

- faster floppy (based on cdiffs by entropy (Lawrence Foard), but I
  didn't patch in the formatting code).  Untaring from a floppy is no
  longer a pain.

- VFS-stubs (based on cdiffs by proven (Chris Provenzo), but again my
  version does not contain all of his code, and I added some changes of
  my own too.)

- Better VC handling (works on other cards that EGA/VGA), thanks to
  pmacdona (Peter McDonald).  I think 0.13 finally contains most of the
  VC code things: screen blanking, corrected vt100-codes etc. 

- Swapon system call (swapping from files as well as block devices),
  based on patches by Simmule Turner.  This one needs some additional
  work still.

- poe-IGL-1.2 (or close to it).

- ptrace (by Ross Biro) - not guaranteed, but I think we'll get gdb
  working in 0.95. 

- bugfixes and minor enhancements: file protections, nonblocking IO,
  UK and Danish keyboards, rename etc. 

Most of the patches have been heavily edited by me (indeed, very few of
them are patched in automatically with 'patch'), and not all of the
functionality of all the patches will be there.  I've mostly written in
the patches by hand, so the author of the code will not necessarily even
recognize his own work.  As with the VC patches, some of these patches
will probably evolve for a few releases before they get their final form
(especially VFS which was easily the biggest patch to date). 


Changes that haven't been seen as patches that will be in 0.95:

- many minor corrections (rename corrected, ^S/^Q corrected, better (?)
  buffer-cache handling, some corrected error-returns).

- lockup bugs (two of them) removed: I hope that was the last of them
  (yeah, sure..).

- minor race-conditions with swapping removed (still not 100%, but
  better, and I hope the "block already free'd" error should go away)

- TIOCxWINSZ works now.

- Harddisk changes: the second harddisk will be on minor numbers 64-127
  instead of 5-9 as now.  I also have some code there that hopefully
  gets extended partitions right, but as I haven't been able to test it
  I somehow doubt it works 100% ... The default harddisk names have
  changed: here's a simple listing

	new	minor		old	minor
	
	hda	0		hd0	0
	hda1	1		hd1	1
	hda2	2		hd2	2
	hda3	3		hd3	3
	hda4	4		hd4	4
	hda5	5 (extended)	-	-
	hdaX	X  -- "" --	-	-

	hdb	64		hd5	5
	hdb1	65		hd6	6
	etc

  I'm guessing this will get some people confused, but the old naming
  and numbering conventions were so bad as to be pretty unusable with
  extended partitions.  Fdisk currently doesn't understand extended
  partitions: I'll try to get that corrected too.

Patches available now, but NOT in 0.95:

- printer port patch.  I still haven't gotten around to this one, as I
  haven't got a printer.  So sue me. 

- SCSI driver: didn't make it in time.  I don't expect too many problems
  applying the 0.12-patch to 0.95. 

- mmap patch: not in time, and so specialized I felt there wasn't that
  much of a hurry.  Again, this patch should probably patch into 0.95
  without undue problems. 

So: I hope 0.13 should prove to be more stable, and more easily
extensible, but it will look mostly like 0.12 with a init/login.  No
/major/ new features like in eariler releases: I hope that means linux
is getting more mature rather than stagnating :)

		Linus