[9fans] Update (fwd)

[Jim Choate]

FYI

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 23:59:21 -0500
From: rob pike <rob at plan9.bell-labs.com>
Reply-To: 9fans at cse.psu.edu
To: 9fans at 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