The new kernel also uses the new pagecache for actual read() operations,
and accordingly gets much better cache throughput than the old one (the
throughput of cached file data is now roughly the same as the throughput
of "memcpy()"..)
There are still a few cache balancing issues that probably need to be
sorted out (improving the inode cache, and improving the cache-out
algorithms), but it works fine even now.
Oh, this release may or may not work on Linux/alpha: at least gcc-2.7.0
using -O2 seems to mess up the compilation of fs/ext2/file.c (it
compiles "cleanly", but the resulting assembly doesn't really match the
original C code very well - it dies on bootup). I haven't tried a newer
compiler (anybody?).
Other changes in 1.3.53:
- some ppc updates (Cort Dougan)
- modularized ramdisk (Tom Dyas)
- updated depca and ewrk3 drivers (David Davies)
- hopefully compiles without module support..
- NCP filesystem (Volker Lendecke) (note that the NCP filesystem
doesn't really work fully, due to a bug in the IPX layer)
I'll be more than happy to hear comments about this: this time I
actually tested that it works ok on a 6MB machine (and after having seen
just exactly how slow it is to run X on it, I stopped immediately.
Thank God for university-paid-for-memory).
Linus