Changes in 0.97: - The VESA-support was removed. I'd be happy to put it back once it works on all hardware. Instead of the VESA-code, I finally put in the automatic SVGA setup patches. See the top-level Makefile. - The IRQ code has solidified, and should work on all machines. Not all of the SCSI drivers use it yet, so I expect patches for that.. - Serial interrupts are handled slightly differently, and performance should be up. I've sent out a few alpha-releases, and testing seems to indicate that's actually true this time. Reactions have ranged from "nice" to "wonderful" :-) - The buffer-cache and memory management code has been edited quite a bit. ps/free etc programs that reads kernel memory directly no longer work, and even a recompilation won't be enough. They actually need editing before they work. The buffer-cache now grows and shrinks dynamically depending on how much free memory there is. Shift+PrintScreen will give some memory statistics. (Ctrl+PrSc gives task-info, ALT+PrSc gives current register values). The mm code changes removed some race-conditions in the VM code, and I also tried to make the Out-of-swapspace error less severe (better thrashing-detection etc). - The super-block code has been cleaned up. Especially the extended fs needs to be edited a bit to take advantage of the new setup, and I expect Remy Card will have a patch out eventually. - include-files have been moved around some more: there are still some names that clash with the standard headers, but not many. - Unswappable processes implemented: by default only 'init' is unswappable. This is a bit safer in low-memory conditions, as at least init won't die due to low memory. I also made killing init impossible: if init doesn't recognize a signal, it simply won't get it. Some other changes ("while (1) fork();" won't kill the machine for non-root users etc) - The new SCSI drivers are in. These make the kernel noticeably bigger, but you can leave them out if you don't want them. - The floppy- and hd-drivers print out more debugging-info in case of errors: this might be irritating if you have hardware that works, but often gives soft-errors. On the other hand, some old debugging-info was removed - notably for user-level protection errors etc. - Various minor fixes. I haven't made cdiffs (and I haven't gotten any requests for them, so I probably never will), but they would be pretty big. Things that I didn't have time for: - I wanted to rewrite the tty drivers to be more "streams-like" (ie not an actual streams-implementation, but some of the ideas from streams). I never got around to it: there was simply too much else to do. - I got a lot of patches, and some went in, others didn't. If you think your patch was important, please re-send it relative to the new version. I'd like comments on the new system: performance / clarity of code etc. 0.97 should correct all known bugs (at least the ones I know about), but I guess that's just wishful thinking. Note that the dynamic buffer-code also handles differently-sized buffers, but that the rest of the system (block device drivers, filesystem code etc) cannot yet take advantage of this - there is still some coding needed. Linus