Code Freeze

From: Linus Torvalds torvalds@cc.helsinki.fi
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce
Subject: Approaching 1.2.x, I hope
Date: 30 Jul 1994 02:05:45 +0300

I'm slowly making ready for something looking like a code-freeze for 1.2.x, and that means you can all start doing your favorite pre-release stuff: doing weird things to the latest kernels and seeing how they break. And maybe even sending me in a report (or patches if you feel like it).

The latest kernel right now is 1.1.36 (but they have changed daily) and contains the “mprotect()” system call that some people have been asking for. The last kernels have gone through major re-organizations in the memory manager, so we'll see how well it works out. Also, I wrote the mprotect stuff from scratch instead of using any of the old patches, so that's rather untested. If you have something depending on mprotect, do give this one a try.

(Aside: The mmap() interface still doesn't allow shared writeable mappings, but now you can do a shared read-only map and then “upgrade” it with mprotect(). That's not supposed to work, but I didn't bother to put in the extra checks, as I hope to have real write-mappings working some day. Going through mprotect is likely to give bogus results, etc; don't even try it as the kernel may do strange things.)

Lots of other stuff has also changed in the 1.1.x releases; sorry for not doing release-notes, but I'm too lazy. Essentially everything is faster, bigger and better, but it may be a bit unstable which is why I'd like people to test it out. The credit goes to everybody who has written code and tested so far (including, but not limited to Alan Cox, Eric Youngdale, Mark Lord, Jacques Gelinas, Hannu Savolainen, Frank Lofaro, Rik Faith, Bjvrn Ekwall, Remy Card, Dmitry Gorodchanin...,the list goes on forever).

Anyway, I hope 1.1.40 (or 1.1.50 or whatever) will turn out stable enough to be called 1.2.0 so that people who want to use mainly stable kernels know which version to get. Sadly, everything always works perfectly for me, so in order to find the problems some outside help is needed.

—Linus