Changes from 1.3.34 to 1.3.35

These changes are archived on ftp.crynwr.com:pub/kchanges and http://www.crynwr.com/kchanges. I cannot answer questions about Linux -- I merely summarize the kernel patches after reading them. I try to make them useful to everyone, but kernel hackers should take them with a grain of salt and read the patches themselves. The patch file is patch-1.3.35.gz

These are from Linus:

I just made a linux-1.3.36 release: it's available on ftp.cs.helsinki.fi and ftp.funet.fi (ftp.cs.helsinki.fi had a bad version for about fifteen minutes: if you have fetched a patch-1.3.36 before reading this mail from there, please check that the sizes are correct: they should be 3253122 and 545696 bytes for the full source archive and the gzipped patch respectively).

Note that the 1.3.36 diffs are rather large: this is mostly due to some re-organizations of the source tree, and "diff" doesn't handle that too gracefully. I've moved all CD-ROM-only drivers (ie not SCSI or ATAPI cdroms) to a directory of their own.

I've also changed the configuration process a bit: it's a more "distributed" configuration now, with the config files scattered around to the places that they actually configure. Thus the IP configuration info can be found in linux/net/ipv4/Config.in etc.

The actual configuration process is the same, though, so don't worry, it won't be too confusing. The re-organization _did_ break the "xconfig" config, so you'll have to make do with the boring text configuration until xconfig has been updated to the new setup.

• cdrom drivers moved
• Config files decentralized
• IDE driver updated (some people had problems with 1.3.35, that should be fixed now).
• floppy driver portability changes
• EQL driver fixed (used "current", which is now a define and a no-no)
• msdos shouldn't panic (same problem as EQL) any more
• PPP symtab registering fix
• SCSI tape driver update
• sound driver updated to 3.5-alpha3
• truncate() and mapped files problems bugfix (this one was potentially very serious).
• minor NFS client update
• Calculations of "nice" and "priority" values changed
• readv()/writev() should do the RightThing(tm) when it comes to sockets.
• Various network updates (mondo cleanups)

NOTE!! The priority calculation changes change some user-level issues. In particular, linux used to do some very strange things with "nice" values, and have a range of -20..+14 for nice values rather than a more normal range. I changed that to do a better nice value calculation (incidentally making it work correctly on the alpha too, I hope), and old binaries of "top" will as a result indicate that normal processes are running with a -5 nice value. Oh, well..

Also, the Linux libraries might some day be changed to use the native "readv/writev" system calls, instead of doing a re-packaging on the user stack etc overhead to emulate them in user space. This might help X performance a bit.

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