user-mode port 0.24-2.3.99-pre9

From: Jeff Dike (jdike@karaya.com)
Date: Mon May 29 2000 - 23:38:00 EST


The user-mode port of 2.3.99-pre9 is available.

There is now a real hardware interrupt mechanism, which I got by copying the
i386 irq code, and wrapping user-mode stuff around it. The consoles and
network device now do their I/O off interrupts rather than the timer, which
greatly reduces latency. The interactive feel is much better, especially
under X.

As a side-effect of this, 'cat /proc/interrupts' will no longer hang the
kernel :-)

I fixed the stair-stepping problem with the console output.

I also fixed the problem that some people had running kernels that they had
built themselves. So, if you built a -pre8 kernel from source, and it did
nothing but hang, that's fixed.

I've also got some caveats to go with this batch of good news. Now that this
port is much more interrupt-driven, it is more prone to races. I've fixed a
bunch of them, but I still see an occasional process segfault.

There is also a slight difficulty at times with the network. Sometimes
packets will stop flowing. I have no idea why, but typing at a console will
wake things up and get those packets flowing again. This is most easy to
reproduce under X (start an xterm and a window manager and wave the mouse in
and out of the xterm, and after a while, the xterm will stop blinking and the
mouse will stop changing shape), but I've also seen it affect ping.

The project's home page is http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net
The project's download page is http://sourceforge.net/project/filelist.php?grou
p_id=429

                                Jeff

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