From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux
Subject: Re: Progress report?
Date: 7 Sep 92 14:22:46 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki

In article <1992Sep7.125312.20025@wam.umd.edu> joel@wam.umd.edu (Joel M. Hoffman) writes:
>I've been away for the Summer, and have missed most of c.o.l.  Could
>someone who's been following it for the the Summer please let me know
>what I've missed.  My last kernel is 0.96.

Get 0.97.pl4 - it seems to be stable (knock wood: I haven't gotten any
reports on it yet), and fixes a lot of things.  Out today, and available
at "nic.funet.fi" "pub/OS/Linux/testing/Linus". 

You might want to reinstall from scratch: the mcc or SLS releases look
promising, although I naturally haven't tried either.  They get you the
current compiler and good versions of most of the standard tools
(although you should probably get the new 'mount' package that fixes a
lot of bugs.  Good work - I liked it)

>Specifically, is there a DOS emulator yet?  Have the VM86 patches at
>least made it into the standard distribution?  Have my code-page
>patches made it into the standard distribution?

The original VM86 patches never made it into the standard kernel, but I
implemented a very similar vm86() system call when rewriting the mm (it
got very easy after that), and yes, there is a working msdos emulator
available.  But it's very simple (but fun: having DOS running under X11
in an xterm sure gives a professional feeling to the system :-), and
gives up for any program that tries to do anything more complicated, so
it's not useable for "real" work yet.  You can boot up a msdos floppy on
it, and play around with "dir" etc, but that's about it (has anybody
tried early versions of turbo-pascal? they should work on almost
anything).  Expect to hack on it before it's actually practical. 

As to any code-page patches, I have to admit I can't remember them, so I
don't know if the current kernel does something similar. 

>My GCC library is marked lib92.04.06.  Is there a new one?  If I get
>the new one, do I have to recompile all of my programs?  Do we have
>jump-tables yet so that when a newer library comes out programs won't
>have to be recompiled?

Wait a week or so for the next release, which hopefully will use the
"final" jump-table setup (as well as having new X11 libraries etc). 
After that, the libraries should finally be stable (sure...) - the
libraries already seem to work well, but they were changed to take
advantage of the new mm setup, and the new version is in testing right
now. 

lib92.04.06 is totally obsolete, and I doubt it can be found anywhere
any more (I think I removed it from my disk a month ago, and most people
probably never even saw it). 

>Is there anything else I would want to know about?

Not really: 0.97.pl4 has some new features (/many/ new features when
compared to 0.96) and should be faster/better etc, but the best way to
find out is probably just to get the new system.  Anything older than
0.96c.pl2 should probably not be used any more: 0.96c.pl2 is pretty
stable, but I do believe 0.97.pl4 is better in almost all respects (it's
bigger, but uses memory better, so you should actually have more free
mem anyway).  It's not too much tested, so I'm still keeping my fingers
crossed, but even if there are bugs it's sure to be better than
unpatched 0.96 which could be crashed just by catting some binaries to
the VC's. 

Tcp/ip is getting there, and I expect it to be in the standard kernel in
a couple of weeks.  The extended filesystem is still in a bit of a flux,
but most other things should hopefully have calmed down now (I can't
guarantee all the minix-fs bugs are gone, but I feel pretty good about
it all).  I'm finally getting happy about the kernel: I have no major
project going on any more.  Naturally there are "details" like loadable
device drivers, shmem(), mmap() etc that are interesting, and need to be
implemented one way or another, but I've been feeling content since
0.97.2, and while I had to fix a couple of bugs in it, I still think 1.0
can be reality without any more major rewrites. 

		Linus

(Note: "feeling good about it" does NOT mean I'll stop working on it
after 1.0 - I distinctly remember feeling good about version 0.12, and
things have certainly changed since then.  I just enjoy feeling good
about my code, so I try to do it as much as possible :-)