[Syllable-announce] Syllable 0.5.5 released!

SourceForge Headquarters 225 Broadway Suite 1600 San Diego, CA 92101 +1 (858) 454-5900

Syllable 0.5.5 is now available!  This release includes new and updated 
drivers and a large number of long overdue kernel enhancements.

Highlights include an Intel i855 video driver, SiS900 and nVidia nForce NIC 
drivers, updates to drivers for nVidia Riva and GeForce cards and support for 
the GeForceFX 6600 & 6800 cards, better USB disk performance and enhanced PCI 
and ATA device management.

This release also includes a number of kernel improvements and bug fixes 
thanks to the hard work of Jake Hamby.

The full changelog is below, and for those of you with nVidia GeForce cards 
(Not Riva or GeForce FX) should make sure to read the upgrade instructions at 
the bottom of this email (Or http://www.syllable.org/docs/0.5.5/upgrade.txt)
--
Changes for Syllable 0.5.5

Drivers
	o Intel i852/i855 video driver added
		o Supports i830, i845, i852, i855 and i865 chipsets.
		o The driver can currently only use the primary output as seen by the bios
		   and so cannot access a crt and a lcd at the same time.
		o There is currently no way to set the refresh rate.
		o Accelerated fills and blits, hardware cursor and uyvy video overlays.
	o Updated the GeForceFX driver to support older GeForce cards and the GeForce
	   6600/6800
	o Moved the support for nVIDIA Riva cards from the now unused nvidia driver
	   to a new dedicated riva driver
	o Better handling of multiple mixer devices for Trident audio cards.  Patch
	   from Colin Phipps <cp...@cp...>
	o The PCI busmanager can now configure the routing table on via/sis/intel
	   chipsets
	o ATA driver:
		o 48bit lba support enabled by default
		o All controllers are initialized before they are passed to the ATA
		   busmanager
	o scsi_readv() and scsi_writev() implemented in the SCSI bus manager which
	   improves the performance of USB devices
	o SiS 900 NIC driver from from Michael Krueger <inv...@we...>
	o nVidia "nForce" NIC driver from from Michael Krueger <inv...@we...>,
	   based on the Linux "forcedeth" driver.
	o Removed the buggy and S3 Savage IX/MX driver.  S3 Savage IX/MX cards will
	   work with the Vesa 2.0 driver.
	o fatfs will now display short filenames correctly as upper- or lowercase
	   using flags set by Windows.  All filenames should now display with the
	   correct case.
	o Fix Radeon driver for 1400x1050 resolution and any other resolution whose
	   width isn't an even multiple of 64 pixels.  Patch contributed by Nicolai
	   Haehnle.
	o 32bit "hardware" cursor support in the VMWare driver from James Hayhurst
	   <san...@ya...>
	o Matrox driver
		o Recognise 0x2537 PCI ID for G550
		o Properly detect a G450
		o Fall back to Vesa BIOS for Gx50 DAC cards E.g. G450, 550 and Parhaliea

Kernel
	o Reverted the function find_boot_dev() to version 1.13 of init.c
	o Updated BogoMIPS calculation and udelay.c from Linux for slightly greater 
accuracy.
	o init_e820_memory_map() prints the memory map returned by the BIOS.
	o Added a few signals to <posix/signal.h> for POSIX completeness.
	o Added cpu id for Celeron M & Pentium M
	o sys_kill() will verify that the real or effective user ID of the calling
	   process matches either the real or saved user ID of the receiving process,
	   or the caller is root, or the calling process is sending SIGCONT to a
	   process with the same session ID (to allow job control of setuid
	   programs).
	o Fix fault.c to send SIGSEGV, SIGFPE, and SIGILL signals to the faulting
	   thread instead of to all threads.
	o Fixed ExceptionHand() to kill the thread causing the exception with SIGSEGV
	o Implement lazy FPU save/restore for faster context switching and save the
	   state of XMM registers on Pentium3 and above for SSE support.
	o Exception handlers in fault.c send signals (SIGSEGV, SIGFPE, SIGILL) rather
	   than exiting the process.
	o The function is_signals_pending() is now correctly spelled
	   is_signal_pending().
	o The new SeqLock_s type from Linux is used in timer.c for reading the timer
	   registers without disabling interrupts, and the "inc/io_ports.h" header
	   defines constants for the PIC I/O ports, which are used for readability in
	   irq.c, smp.c and timer.c.
	o Added a warning to kmalloc() when 128K or larger allocations are made
	o Changes to the atomic_t primitives:
		o Replaced the primitives in atheos/atomic.h with versions based on Linux 
		   2.6.8's include/asm-i386/atomic.h.
		o Replaced occurrences of atomic_add(&foo, 1) and atomic_add(&foo, -1) with 
		   atomic_inc(&foo) and atomic_dec(&foo), which are slightly faster and more
		   self-explanatory.
		o Many of the drivers were Linux ports that used the atomic_*() macros
		   properly; comment out the compatibility macros in "linuxcomp.h"
	o Patch to kernel/debug.c which fixes the code to work properly if your
	   client sends <CR>, <CR><LF>, or <CR><NUL> for newline.  This patch is
	   intended to allow the use of a Telnet client as a debug terminal in
	   conjunction with VMWare.
	o Fixed a possible race condition in devices.c/register_device()  Spotted by
	   Peter Skerl <sk...@ch...>
	o Fix to allow the kernel to build with -O2 instead of -O3
		o Changed Fork() to a static inline function and commented out the prototype
		   in include/atheos/kernel.h. 
	o Build the kernel with "-O2 -mpreferred-stack-boundary=2" instead of -O3

Libsyllable
	o Added ShortcutKey::GetKeyCode() and ShortcutKey::GetQualifiers().
	o Checked in patches from Arno that change the look of selected items in
	   ListViewStringRow and TreeViewStringNode.
	o Fix font kerning in os::TextView

Appserver
	o Some speed improvements in the DisplayDriver class
	o New decorator: WarpSpeed

Applications
	o Albert
		o Fixed the crash in the about window.
	o ATerm
		o Improved dead key support

Misc 
	o Upgraded to Grub 0.95
--
		UPGRADING FROM SYLLABLE 0.5.4

If you are using Syllable on a computer with an nVidia GeForce card (Not 
GeForceFX or Riva/TNT) then you will need to force Syllable to re-scan your 
computer for drivers.  If you do not do this then the PCI bus manager will 
not load the updated geforcefx driver and the appserver will use Vesa 2.0

Once you have upgraded your Syllable installation, reboot your computer.  At 
the Grub menu press the "e" key to edit the current configuration.  Move down 
to the second line:

kernel=/boot/atheos/sys/kernel.so root=/dev/disk/ata/hda/0

(Note that the device for the root= parameter may be different depending on 
the drive and partition you have installed Syllable on)

Press "e" again to edit this line and add "disable_config=true" to the end of 
the line.  The line should now read:

kernel=/boot/atheos/sys/kernel.so root=/dev/disk/ata/hda/0 disable_config=true

Press enter and then "b" to boot Syllable.

When Syllable has booted, log in and open a Terminal.  Delete and re-create 
the kernel configuration file E.g.

$ rm /system/config/kernel.cfg
$ touch /system/config/kernel.cfg

Reboot again and Syllable will re-scan your hardware.  The geforcefx video 
driver will detect your GeForce video card and initialise.
-- 
Vanders
http://www.syllable.org
http://www.liqwyd.com