[coLinux-devel] coLinux 0.5.4

[Dan A. <da...@gm...>]

This release brings the context switching code of coLinux much closer to 
completeness. It's the most sensitive code in this project but the most 
important one.

I'd like to thank Alejandro R. Sedeno for the quick but excellent 
pcap-based Bridged Ethernet contribution, and also others who 
helped to debug other stuff that led to this release.

* Version 0.5.4 AKA "Focal Segmental Glomerulosclerosis" (%gs/%fs) release
  * Fixed an issue with i686-optimized pthread and the preservation of 
    %gs and %fs. The crashes that were caused by the i686 Gentoo image 
    should now disappear. 
    WINE would also work now ;)
  * cobd: Fixed accessing large block devices (1GB >). cobd0 was passing 
    wrong information to userspace.
  * conet: Statistics are now gathered (patch by Pat Erley)
  * Tuned the time conversion between Windows and Linux. The machine is 
    now initialized with the right date, not 4 days backwards.
  * Applied a configuration parsing fix (patch by Ballard Jonathan)
  * Some improvements of the switch code. We now preserve more 
    registers, (MMX/SSE/SSE2/FP), and coLinux now has its own GDT. 
    These changes should assure stability on more systems and processors.
    This fix also appears to solve the problem where processes were 
    stuck on nanosleep() calls.
  * conet-pcap: pcap-based daemon (contributed by Alejandro R. Sedeno). 
  * Network configuration is now handled in the coLinux configuration 
    XML.
    For backward compatibility, add:
    <network index="0" name="TAP" type="tap"></network>
	
    If you want to use pcap (i.e, bridged Ethernet), add:
    <network index="0" name="XXXX" type="bridged"></network>
    (Where XXXX is a substring of your network adapter's name)
      
    Optional attributes: mac="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX" - specifies the MAC
    address of the interface in the Linux side. Recommended on bridged
    networking setups, where more than one Windows machine will be 
    running coLinux on the same subnet.

    I also prepared the ground for supporting more than one network 
    device (i.e, eth1, eth2, etc.), but it is not yet completed.
  * linux: avoid more I/O in time.c.


A side note:

For the non-developers and developers among you: would anyone like to 
update the doc/running file, and whatever documentation files you see 
fit?

-- 
Dan Aloni
da...@gm...