This message announces the availability of version 1.2.10 of Linux/68k. It can be ftped from directory /pub/linux/680x0/v1.2 at tsx-11.mit.edu. As you can probably guess, this version of Linux/68k is "compatible" with version 1.2.10 of the PC version of Linux. BEFORE RUNNING THIS KERNEL, CAREFULLY READ EVERY PART OF THIS ANNOUNCEMENT, AND PLAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THE *EXT2FS* SECTION. Notes: 1) This kernel *cannot* be used with existing 0.9 ext2fs filesystems without "fixing" them. See *EXT2FS* below. 2) This version is distributed as source only. 3) No work has been done (yet) to make this work on the Atari platform. Atari guys, do your magic, and send in those patches. 4) While I've compiled in every Amiga option, this kernel has only been tested on my 68030 A3000, so the only drivers tested are the OCS graphics, the keyboard, the A3000 SCSI driver, the SCSI disk driver, the Amiga serial port driver and the PPP network interface. 5) The Amiga/Atari code in this distribution is pretty much equivalent to that in the 0.9pl6 distribution of Linux/68k. The amiboot-1.11.gz "bootstrap" program for the Amiga can be used to boot this kernel. I use amiga-lilo 0.3 to boot this kernel also. I haven't tried version 0.4 yet. Note that amiga-lilo 0.3 seems to have problems booting kernels of 700k in size. I've created a new ramdisk image to be used with this kernel. It is in filesys-1.2.gz in the v1.2 directory. The most interesting programs in this filesystem from a v1.2 point of view are the /sbin/fsck.ext2, /sbin/mkfs.ext2 and /sbin/update programs. /sbin/fsck.ext2 and /sbin/mkfs.ext2 are versions of the e2fsprogs-0.5b which *must* be used with v1.2 of Linux/68k. See *EXT2FS* below. /sbin/update is the "bdflush" daemon some of you may have heard about. It gives better disk buffer writing performance than the existing /sbin/update program. Note that /sbin/update will only do the "bdflush" business on a 1.2 system, but can be used as a replacement for /sbin/update on older (v0.9) systems also. *EXTFS*: When I first created Linux/68k (and the ported the ext2fs filesystem) I made a bad decision about the implementation of the linux kernel bit operations for the m68k. I made them little-endian when they should really have been big-endian. I have rectified this mistake in v1.2. The bit-operations are big-endian, and the ext2fs filesystem uses these bit operations. This means that the inode and block bitmaps of existing ext2fs filesystems *cannot* be used by the v1.2 kernel. If you want to use existing filesystems, you must boot the 1.2 ramdisk filesystem, and run the /sbin/fsck.ext2 program on every ext2fs filesystem you intend to use with the v1.2 kernel. Note that after running the new fsck.ext2 on these filesystems, they cannot be used by v0.9 kernels unless you run the v0.9 fsck.ext2 on them. If you wish to create a *new* ext2fs partition to use with v1.2, use the mkfs.ext2 on the 1.2 ramdisk filesystem. The patches required to e2fsprogs-0.5b to support Linux/68k v1.2.0 are found in e2fsprogs-0.5b.diffs.gz in the v1.2 directory.