- new "make dep": this one is much faster and better suited to the
kernel dependencies. It doesn't do dependencies recursively, but
instead lets "make" take care of handling those header file inter-
dependencies.
The new dependency files are generated with a very straightforward
setup, and they don't actually parse the files to any greater degree.
This is actually a feature, not a bug, because it also means that the
dependencies do not depend on the configuration.
Letting "make" take care of recursive dependencies also found a few
misfeatures in the header file (circular dependencies in some of the
network stuff: it's perfectly ok per se, but rather ugly, imho).
That made for some changes in how the network header files work: this
_may_ impact on some specific system header files as well. Jim Nance.
- (related to the above): makefile changes to use more general rules
and less duplication in the sub-makefiles. Jim Nance.
- ide driver update: extensive changes to be able to more cleanly
support multiple controllers (ide-cd is also made more stand-alone by
this). Mark Lord.
- various net driver module cleanup patches. Stefan Kuehnel.
- Extensive /proc filesystem cleanups. It's not perfect yet, but most
of it is actually fully dynamic now (you can load and unload files
from /proc, /proc/net and /proc/<pid>/ at run-time). There are some
redundancies there still.. Yours truly.
I have gotten a few reports of "strace" completely freezing a few
machines. So far these reports have had two things in common: a Pentium
processor and gcc-2.7.0. It may be that the Pentium 4MB page table code
does strange things on some machines, or that gcc-2.7.0 compiles the
code to something I never meant it to be.. I'd like to hear if the
people that can make this happen could try an older compiler to check.
Anything else that has problems with this kernel?
Linus