Release Notes For Linux 2.0.34

Notes

Pioneer DR-A24X
This drive is known to become confused when probed for ATA drive type. A workaround for this drive is now documented.

Bug Fixes

Fragment handling bug
A bug in fragment handling that could cause a kernel crash has been fixed.
Unsafe temporary file
The 'make config' script used an unsafe temporary file. It now uses a file in its working directory.
TCP accept crash
There was a race condition in tcp accept paths that could cause GFP's (normally non fatal) and stuck sockets in 2.0.3x
PPP hang
PPP could hang the machine if a new connection was created on the same logical channel before the previous daemon died.
MM Corruption
A bug in which 2.0.33 could suffer memory corruption and possible crashes under very high load has been fixed.
APM suspend fails on Thinkpad 560
Linux can now ignore multiple suspend events generated by the 560 bios. This means the 560 suspend support now functions in Linux.
Fringe IEEE floating point errors
The Alpha platform showed some fringe errors handling certain math operations. These have been corrected.
Incorrect asm syntax
The i386 SMP code contained invalid assembler that the GNU assembler did not notice, and compiled to the correct opcodes. Newer versions of GNU as correctly complain. The code is now fixed.
LDT Leak
A situation which DOSemu and Wine could leak memory used for LDT tables has been fixed.
LDT limits
When forking/cloning a task only the first 512 LDT entries would ever be copied. All are now copied correctly.
RDTSC bugs
The use of RDTSC is disabled for Cyrix CPU's. It seems to be faulty and reports the same stamp on two executions in certain cases. Intels specification requires that the same stamp is never repeated within a ten year period.
Floppy Driver
A bug in which the floppy driver could crash when its interrupt or DMA resources were not available has been fixed. This was an extremely abnormal situation but a real bugs.
Inode count overrun
A bug in which a specifically malicious program could cause an inode count overrun has been fixed.
Obscure serial race
An obscure race in the serial driver has been removed.
ISDN handling
A couple of small bugs have been fixed in the ISDN network handling in isdn4linux.
Compile errors
Certain modules (eg the spellcaster ISDN) contained references to non kernel headers that caused them not to compile in some environments. These have been corrected.
SK_G16
This driver could leak I/O resources if it failed to initialise. Fixed.
IDE-SCSI
The buggy SENSE6/SELECT6 handling has been removed. A variable timeout is now supported.
PPA SCSI driver
If this driver failed to detect the parallel port adapter and initialise it the entire machine would crash. Fixed.
SCSI unload crashes
A situation where unloading SCSI left invalid partition information around has been resolved.
Generic RO ioctls
The generic ioctl set where missing from SCSI disks. This has been rectified.
Quota crash
A very obscure situation in which the quota subsystem performed an invalid seek on the quota database has been fixed.
Memory corruption on clone
A bug causing memory corruption when mmaping memory during a clone in specific situations has been fixed.
Possible overflow on Alpha
A possible integer overflow on group handling for the Alpha platform has been fixed.
Sysctl
An off by one error in the sysctl handling has been removed.
Xntpd
A time constant larger than MAXTC(6) is supported for NTP(4)
Socket crashes
A possible socket layer crash with AX.25/NetROM/ROSE/X.25 has been fixed in 2.0.34
RAW socket handling
A small bug in raw socket handling which could cause a crash in very obscure situations has been fixed.
Loading bogus modules
A situation existed in earlier kernels where a user process could cause a module to be loaded. It was possible to exploit this to load modules that the administrator had installed but did not wish loaded. Fixed in 2.0.34. Note that this means only superuser processes can load network interfaces.
IGMP
IGMP leave messages are now sent to the 'all routers' group. IP multicast messages are looped back locally for the mroute daemon.
Incorrect fragmentation needed messages
A bug in the sending of fragmentation needed messages has been fixed.
TCP listened to ICMP source quench
This is no longer 'good practice' and we also backed off twice once from the error and once from the drop. This was primarily needed to handle 3COM office connect routers which appear to send source quench (its been obsolete for years so they should not) and without rate limiting (also not allowed).
Window searching
An obscure quirk allowing a third party to discover the current window for a TCP connection has been fixed.
IPX checksums
IPX incorrectly handled checksummed IPX frames (eg from FT Netware). This has been fixed.
Menuconfig could crash
Menuconfig now handles large lists properly and several other configuration handling bugs in it have been removed.
Unsafe temporary file
The 'make config' script used an unsafe temporary file. It now uses a file in its working directory.

Enhancements

Swapping Improvements
The virtual memory handling has been improved. Loaded machines may see up to 10% throughput increases.
Root Filesystem
The root filesystem on the commandline can be specified to include IDE drivers 5-8, and more SCSI devices.
UltraDMA and Large IDE disk
Support for UltraDMA and for large IDE disks has been added to 2.0.34 as in 2.1.x development kernels.
Native language codepage/unicode support for filesystems
These facilities currently available in Linux 2.1.x development have been made available in the 2.0 stable kernel series.
ISOfs extensions
As with 2.1.x series kernels Joliet and UTF8 support has been added to the ISO file system. The documentation has been updated to match.
VFAT extensions
As with 2.1.x series kernels NLS and UTF8 support has been added to the VFAT file system. The documentation has been updated to match. The FAT32 file system is now supported.
NFS updates
NFS now understands NFSERR_XDEV. NFS copes with broken NFS servers that report a file type of '0'. An additional attribute cache flush is done on the parent directory in some cases where the link count may have changed.
SMBFS updates
The SMB file system has been significantly enhanced especially in the area of time stamps.
Dynamic Address Rewriting
An additional 'RST provoking' mode is supported for ISDN sessions.
Basic securelevel is implemented
Securelevel is added as a user request item. Linux 2.1.x includes capabilities work and this will replace securelevel in 2.2.
Large Listen Queues
The underlying socket code now supports the setting of large listen queues in excess of 128. The current behaviour is not to enable this facility.
XT hard disk
The driver for legacy XT 8bit hard disks has been significantly enhanced.
Console Performance
The console speed enhancements from 2.1.x kernels have been backported to Linux 2.0.
Numerous network drivers updated
The network drivers are now mostly in synchronization with Donald Becker's reference set at CESDIS. The 3c509 has not been updated due to problem reports with the newer driver. The following drivers are updated: 3c59x, at1700, eepro, eepro100, hp100, lance, ne2000 (ISA and PCI drivers split), lance32/pcnet32, smc-ultra, smc-ultra32, tulip,
Alien PCI types
Unknown PCI types are now handled more gracefully.
BusLogic Driver
The BusLogic SCSI driver has been updated.
NCR53c8xx
The NCR53c8xx driver has been signifcantly updated.
Adaptec AIC7xxx
The Adaptec driver has been updated and supports more devices. Numerous known bugs have been fixed.
IN2000
The IN2000 driver works with more cards.
Advansys
The in kernel vendor supplied Advansys driver has been updated.
Tekram DC390
This driver has been enhanced to handle partitions of over 1GB.
EATA update
The EATA driver has been slightly updated.
SCSI ioctl extensions
The SCSI ioctl calls have been enhanced to include SCSI_IOCTL_GET_BUS_NUMBER from 2.1.x.
SCSI disk recovered error
SCSI disk recovered errors now indicate success after recovery by the target device. Recovered I/O errors are logged.
WD7000
Miscellaneous cleanups.

New Network Drivers

3com 3c515
A driver for the 3c515 network card has been added to the mainstream kernel.
TI Thunderlan
A driver for the TI thunderlan network chip has been added. This is the device commonly found on Compaq network cards.
SMC EtherpowerII
A driver for the SMC83c170/175 EPIC series of chips as used on the SMC EtherPower II 9432 adapter and several cardbus devices.
RealTel RTL8129/8139
Support for the various low end boards using these chipsets.
Packet Engines G-NIC
Support has been added for the Packet Engines gigabit ethernet controller.