[coLinux-users] snapshot 20040710

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

Good evening,

I've just uploaded a new snapshot - 20040710. It brings forth a bunch
of changes, and hopefully solves some reported bugs (I'd be glad to
receive confirmation mails).

Changes since 20040622:

  * Added a coserial deamon, that allows one to open a serial terminal 
    to the guest machine (You can run /sbin/mgetty ttyS0 in the guest
    and then run the daemon in the host and get a login prompt :).
    Porting this daemon to Windows should be relatively easy, though I 
    can't promise that the Windows Win32 console can handle the terminal 
    properties of the Linux end, but it would be interesting to find out.
  * Improved debugging - we now have a debug messages "collector"
    deamon named colinux-debug-deamon, which collects debug messages
    from all the coLinux components. This also changes the way things
    are printed when you run the daemon (it is now easier to see
    what belongs to what). All debug messages are off by default,
    so things may go a little faster.    
  * An API version number was added to make sure that you use the
    right vmlinux and user-space executables with the right coLinux 
    driver (previously it caused crashes if the APIs changed).
  * Bug fix: A tiny memory leak when coLinux is shutting down.
  * Bug fix: Proper reference counting of the driver in the Linux
    port.
  * Bug fix: The network driver (conet) now verifies checksums (as
    network packets that are received by PCAP can indeed be bad).
  * Added block device aliasing, e.g alias="hda2". You can specify
    such an alias in the <block_device> element in the configuration 
    XML and expect coLinux to mount it, even when passed with root=.
    NOTE: The cobdX device and its alias are mutual exclusive, which
    means that you can't mount both of them at the same time. 
  * Bug fix: Proper floating point state preservation in the Linux
    guest. coLinux now passes the flops20 test program.
  * Implemented a new timer for the Linux guest, this should fix
    time-going-back issues.
  * Improved message passing, which may boost networking a bit.
  * Win32-TAP driver upgraded to version 8.1. This version doesn't 
    bring any changes to the actual driver code. However it was 
    released in order to notify the other projects that bundle the 
    TAP driver along with their software, to modify the name 
    identifer of the driver so that multiple TAP driver users can 
    coexist (e.g, OpenVPN with coLinux). Therefore, coLinux now 
    installs its TAP driver as TAPxxxxco (where xxxx is the 
    driver version).
    After installing it, you will notice " (coLinux)" appended to
    the device name in the Network Connections manager. The old
    driver will remain until it is uninstalled.

-- 
Dan Aloni
da...@co...