Linux 2.1 Kernel Patches

About the Kernel Patch Summaries

These summaries are written after each kernel release by examining the chunks of each patch file and figuring out what has changed. Occasionally, they are supplemented by notes that Linus (and others) posted to the linux-kernel mailing list.

The summaries from 2.1.0 to 2.1.51 were put together by Mark Evans <mevans@ecsnet.com>.

The summaries from 2.1.54 onwards were put together by Myrdraal@deathsdoor.com -- originally appearing on the Cutting Edge Linux website.

Yaroslav Rosomakho is now also writing some kernel summaries, including pre-patches!

Linux 2.1.69 patch - patch-2.1.69.gz (1-Dec-97 13:42)
    [Patch Browser]

• Lowlevel assembly changes for i386 and alpha archs.
• Aztech CD-ROM driver updates.
• Serial driver bugfixes / warning about speed_hi ioctls.
• Various fixes for new signal handling. (sound, etc)
• Parport driver updated to compile.
• Various updates to change some uses of 'unsigned long' to 'mm_segment_t'.

---

I made a 2.1.69 release that fixes up some of the more obvious problems with 2.1.68 wrt the sound driver and the fact that 68 can lock up mysteriously when compiled as SMP, usually pretty quickly. This also continues some of the integration work on getting pending code into the standard kernel.

Anyway, I personally don't see anything major pending. There are still various fixes that have yet to be integrated (some of the smbfs work by Bill etc), but on the whole I'd call this feature-freeze time. Have fun,

Linus

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Linux 2.1.68 patch - patch-2.1.68.gz (30-Nov-97 15:15)
    [Patch Browser]

NOTE: Well, the signal stuff seems to have broken alot of drivers, such as sound, netlink, isdn, etc. Running the offending sound and netlink stuff through sed 's/current->signal & ~current->blocked/signal_pending\(current\)/g' made it compile for me, but it wouldn't complete the boot. My advice - wait for 2.1.69 :)

• IDE DMA support added for most pentium PCI chipsets.
• POSIX.1b realtime signal support added.
• Various ALPHA updates for new signal code.
• Various x86 updates for new signal code. (All other platforms broken.)
• BSD UNIX domain socket support can be compiled out, or as a module. (Remember to add 'alias net-pf-1 unix' if you're compiling it as a module.
• IDE driver updates and bugfixes.
• hfmodem driver updates.
• lp driver updates.
• PC WatchDog driver updates for filesystem changes.
• parport updates.
• STRIP (Metricom starmode radio IP) support enabled.
• Baycom net driver updates.
• Various updates to use udelays instead of SLOW_DOWN_IO.
• net_init.c updates.
• PPP driver minor updates.
• SLIP driver minor updates.
• Sound driver updates.
• BSD Process accounting support added.
• Various net-related headerfile updates.
• Netlink support changed to seperate 'packet socket' and 'netlink socket' options.
• Config option if the CPU is too slow to handle the full net bandwidth.
• QoS and/or fair queueing support added.
• Multicast driver updates.
• SO_BINDTODEVICE support added.
• 'Advanced router' support added, with options: 'policy routing', 'equal cost multipath', 'use TOS value as routing key', 'verbose route monitoring', and 'large routing tables'.
• Kernel level autoconfiguration option added, using RARP and/or BOOTP.
• GRE tunnels over IP support added.
• FDDI fixed, APFDDI & gen. FDDI bits cleanups.
• Various network system updates.
• IPv6 options added; 'enable EUI-64 token format', and 'disable provided based addresses'.

Linux 2.1.67 patch - patch-2.1.67.gz (29-Nov-97 19:18)
    [Patch Browser]

NOTE: This is really a MAMMOTH patch. I'm not going to read the whole thing that carefully, so I'll just give you the basic changes.
The serial driver 9600 baud bug still exists in this version.
If you're not using SMP you'll have to edit arch/i386/lib/delay.c and change where it includes asm/delay.h to linux/delay.h to get it to compile.
Also, the sound driver is sorta messed up, you'll need to manually insmod the various parts of it, and I had to manually specify my card settings, ie: insmod sb io=544 irq=5 dma=1

• Various documentation files moved around/updated.
• Fix for a possibly serious bug in the TTY layer.
• Various other driver additions and such that didn't get config options (not done yet)
• Sound driver card drivers modularized.
• Support for audio/video capture and overlay devices added.
• Kernel delay routines updated.
• XT harddrive driver updated.
• Minor APM BIOS updates to new filesystem code.
• Joystick driver updates.
• Various net card driver updates.
• PPP BSD compression module minor updates.
• PPP driver updates.
• Minor SLIP updates.
• PNP updates.
• Some ex2fs debug messages removed. (I can hear you all going 'WOOHOO!' :)
• NFS updates.
• Minor FDDI driver updates.
• Minor AppleTalk driver updates.
• Minor SunRPC driver updates.

---

Linux-2.1.67 is out there. It doesn't contain the serial speed changes, because I lost them, but it _does_ contain an alternative fix to the more serious tty problem that Andrea pointed out that could lock up the machine completely. Whether it works or not I don't know, as I haven't seen the behaviour Andrea mentions in the first place, but it would be good if people checked it out.

The 2.1.67 patches are rather huge - I intergrated some patches from Alan that do various documentation file moving (moving readme's to the proper place: the documentation subdirectory) and does the sound driver modularization stuff. There are also some introductory files for video drivers from the m68k camp..

Linus

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Linux 2.1.66 patch - patch-2.1.66.gz (25-Nov-97 16:15)
    [ Patch Browser ]

There seems to be a bug in the serial driver for this version, if you have the port set to 38400 it only connects at 9600. Set it to 57600 and it should work fine. (Did for me, anyhow.) - [ Patch ]

• Major ftape driver updates.
• DEC Alpha strchr assembly code updates.
• Pentium F00F bug workaround updates. (Less performance penalty.)
• TTY and serial driver updates.
• Hayes ESP serial card driver updates.
• Rocketport serial card driver updates.
• PPA driver updates.
• Buffer code minor updates.
• Minor filesystem updates.
• NFS updates.
• SMBFS updates.
• Netlink driver updates.
• SunRPC driver updates.

Linux 2.1.65 patch - patch-2.1.65.gz (17-Nov-97 19:00)

Since 2.1.64 I had a problem compiling the kernel with EGCS, process.c would not compile. Today I found out the reason; if anyone else has that problem, add -fno-strength-reduce to the compile flags.

• i586 f00f bug workaround updates.
• Minor floppy driver update.
• eepro100 net card driver updates.
• Minor sound driver header file updates.
• dcache updates (pruning and such.)
• NFS lockd updates.
• Minor generic filesystem updates.
• NFSD updates.
• select() behavior reverted to update timeout again if appropriate.

Linux 2.1.64 patch - patch-2.1.64.gz (14-Nov-97 19:02)

• Kernel ix86 head.s updates.
• Cosmetic update for /proc/cpuinfo when f00f bug is detected.
• f00f bug workaround updates and bugfixes.
• More updates for new filesystem code.
• Parport driver updates/bugfixes.
• de4x5 net card driver updates.
• PPA driver updates.
• Seagate SCSI driver updates.
• SCSI tapedrive driver updates.
• SB AWE minor update to make it work.
• ext2fs code updates.
• Minor bugfix for isofs.
• ncpfs filesystem updates.
• nfs filesystem updates.
• Minor IPX updates.

Linux 2.1.63 patch - patch-2.1.63.gz (12-Nov-97 11:17)

• RAID-1 (mirroring mode) support added.
• RAID-4/RAID-5 mode added.
• GDT SCSI Disk Array Controller support added.
• Radio card support added.
• AIMSlab RadioTrack card support added.
• Alpha RealTime Clock updates.
• Detection and workaround for the pentium F00F bug added.
• mmap readahead algorithm updates.
• Various driver fixes for new filesystem code.
• Cyclades driver updates and bugfixes.
• Bugfix for joystick driver.
• 3c507 net card driver updates.
• Perceptive Solutions, Inc. PCI-2000, 2220i, 240i device driver proc support added. (SCSI)
• Minor SCSI generic updates.
• OSS/FREE sound driver updated to 3.8s (Includes SoftOSS!)
• Buffer handling updates.
• dcache updates.
• EXT2FS updates.
• FAT/MSDOS filesystem updates.
• NCPFS updates.
• Minor NFS updates.
• io slowdown macro updates.
• multipledisks driver updates.
• ipv4 overlapfrag bugfix.

---

I just made 2.1.63 available on the normal ftp site (ftp.kernel.org, direcoty pub/linux/kernel/v2.1). The most exciting change is probably the preliminary patch by Ingo Molnar that should work around the by now well-known Pentium lock-up bug. Many thanks to Ingo who put together the patch from various snippets of information floating around.

2.1.63 does other things too: it updates the sound driver and the cyclades serial port drievr, adds four new SCSI device drivers, and should fix the worst ncpfs problems (thanks to Bill Hawes, super-programmer).

Please give it a good testing, especially the Pentium bug workaround. Throw all the tests you have at it, to see that it really works. We'll be doing a 2.0.x patch for that too, but it's probably not going to appear for a few days, so in the meantime testing this fix on 2.1.x would be a GoodThing(tm)...

Linus

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Linux 2.1.62 patch - patch-2.1.62.gz (3-Nov-97 12:58)

• Time handling updates for Alpha.
• lp driver updates for new filehandling.
• ISDN driver updates and bugfixes.
• Misc minor net card IRQ freeing updates.
• Minor SCSI driver makefile updates.
• SCSI CD-ROM driver updates.
• Diskquota system fixes.
• NFS bugfixes and updates.

---

Hi,
I just made 2.1.62 available. This one should

- fix some remaining NFS problems. A very big thanks to Bill Hawes who has been simply invaluable in finding and fixing the NFS client bugs, and has been willing to try out some suggestions of mine.
- quota and isdn should compile and may even work. I don't see any reason why they shouldn't work, but I haven't tested them myself. Caveat tester.
- removed last traces of irq2dev_map[], and the world is a better place for it. Thanks to Gordon Chaffee for much of this - I've wanted it done for a long time, but haven't been interested enough to do it myself.

Any comments/problems?

Linus

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Linux 2.1.61 patch - patch-2.1.61.gz (30-Oct-97 17:17)

• Minor autofs updates.
• Minor dcache updates.
• isofs bugfixes and updates.
• Minor generic filesystem updates.
• NFS updates.
• SMBFS updates.
• Minor vfat updates.
• Memory and swap system updates

Linux 2.1.60 patch - patch-2.1.60.gz (25-Oct-97 09:18)

• FAT32 support added (I didn't notice this - thanks to Steve DuChene for pointing that out!)
• Native language codepages and Unicode support updated as a compile option.
• Minor Alpha syscall update.
• MIPS irixelf loader updates.
• SPARC64 aout32 loader updates.
• Various block drivers updated to use dentries.
• Various character drivers updated to use dentries.
• TTY driver updates.
• Minor ethernet card irq handling driver updates.
• Minor PPP driver updates.
• Minor SCSI card driver updates (couldn't figure out what it's doing.)
• AFFS filesystem updates.
• a.out binary loader minor updates.
• ELF binary loader minor updates.
• Minor block_dev updates.
• dcache updates (pruning and such.)
• fs/exec.c updates to use dentries, and signal changes.
• Filesystem updates to use dentries.
• FAT filesystem updates for NLS.
• fs/inode.c updates to do statistics gathering.
• fs/inode.c updates to dentry/inode pruning.
• Joliet CD format support added.
• NFS filesystem updates
• Minor filesystem pipe updates.
• proc filesystem updates.
• Filesystem read/write updates.
• SMBFS minor updates.
• Minor module update.
• Filemap updates.