FYI ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 23:59:21 -0500 From: rob pike <rob@plan9.bell-labs.com> Reply-To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: [9fans] Update An update of the 3rd release is now available at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9 This is likely to be the last shipment using the original protocol; the next release will probably be called the 4th edition and will use the new version of 9P. Note: If you installed Plan 9 between October 29, 2000 and November 29, 2000, you need to grab a new /wrap/plan9/971556349/md5sum file before installing the update. The update page has details. Today's update is substantially larger than previous ones, but there are substantially more things updated.... There are a number of new things, including: - Support for Lucent Orinoco (Wavelan) cards (thanks to Francisco Ballesteros). - Support for the Netgear GA620 gigabit Ethernet cards. - A much faster VNC viewer, vncviewer(1). - A preliminary kernel for the Compaq iPAQ h3650 and h3630, also known as the `bitsy'; look in /sys/src/9/bitsy. Associated with this are a variety of new pieces including a `scribble' library for character recognition and some tools; see scribble(2) and bitsyload(1). - A new compression/decompression library, flate(2). - A new library for grouped allocation, bin(2), plus a per-process allocator for threaded programs, privalloc(2). - A variety of tweaks to libc including case-insensitive string matching and pread and pwrite system calls (read and write with the file offset in the call rather than the fd). - Multiple boot configurations in plan9.ini(8). - Partial support of X.509 certificates. - Partial support of PNG images. - New Acme interfaces for news and wiki. - Support for rc(1)-style quoted strings in the C library, quote(2). This is the harbinger of future things, including: - A preliminary library of graphic controls (widgets); see control(2). There are plenty of bugs fixed, too. Kernel and networking fixes include: - Better timesync algorithms (no longer requiring floating point). - TCP/IP: - No longer loses queued bytes when shutting down a connection. - Too aggressive rexmits removed. - Reads now return as much data as possible instead of just the next segment's worth. - ip/dhcpd: - copy the contents of the gateway field from BOOTP/DHCP requests to replies - deal with requests containing huge leases - some protection against systems that don't give up their leases when they run out. - Graphics: - important fixes to alpha blending and allocation of images. - better conversion of true color to mapped images (rgb2cmap). - Libmp + libsec completely replace libcrypt. - Also assembly routines for various architectures speed things up. And of course zillions of other application and library fixes and enhancements. -rob