Changes from 1.3.37 to 1.3.38

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-1.3.38.gz

These are from Linus:

I just made Linux-1.3.38 available on the normal ftp-sites. I've been away in Romania for a week, and this kernel tries to get most of the patches during that week in.

• the "make depend" awk script has been updated to do CONFIG_XX usage checking, and it will now make rude noises if you use CONFIG_XXX without actually including <linux/config.h> (or alternatively if you include the config file without actually using it). This showed quite a few errors in this area (usually resulting in unnecessarily recompiling some files).
• the SMP option is no longer a configuration option: it's an "architecture" option (make more sense, imho, and also means that we don't need to include the config file just to check for SMP). Like the x86/alpha/sparc etc thing, you actually need to edit the makefile for this (and like the arch changes you have to "make clean" afterwards).
• the <linux/module.h> file got changed: the idea is that all modules include this unconditionally (whether they are compiled as a module or not) to get the appropriate definitions of MOD_INC_COUNT etc. I suspect I broke quite a few modules with this, but it should be trivial to fix in most cases.
• Alan cleaned up the networking layer. Sockets no longer have read/write/send/sendto/recv/recvfrom, and instead all of this is done with sendmsg/recvmsg. This broke smbfs, as far as I know. Shouldn't be too hard to fix, but I didn't quite have the stamina.
• some memory management fixes to fix the buffer cache handling. It should work now, but I'll have to clean it up a bit more still..
• Linux/axp updates: TGA support by Jay Estabrook and various patches by David M-T (and a few cleanups by yours truly to fix the memcpy stuff, for example). The TGA/VGA console handling probably needs to be cleaned up a bit still..
• sound driver update. The new one should hopefully work on the alpha too (but I have not really been able to test, and I've had to edit some of the patches from Hannu without being able to actually test my changes).

I'd hope developers at least take a look at this, espacially with regard to modules and the smbfs..

[Index][Next]