Re: gnumach 1.3 release

[Roland McGrath]

Here is a draft release announcement.  (I'm still not doing anything until
Marcus puts his change in and someone tests it all.)


----

We are pleased to announce version 1.3 of the GNU distribution of the
Mach kernel.  It may be found in the file (about 3.6 MB compressed)
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnumach/gnumach-1.3.tar.gz;
unidiffs from version 1.2 (about 370 KB compressed) are in
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnumach/gnumach-1.2-1.3.diff.gz.

This distribution is only for x86 PC machines.
Volunteers interested in ports to other architectures are eagerly sought.

We are no longer actively developing version 1.x of GNU Mach.  We plan to
make only necessary bug fixes or trivial enhancements in the 1.x line,
and make further 1.x releases only as necessary for those purposes.
New development efforts have been underway for some time on a new version
of GNU Mach using the OSKit from the University of Utah for hardware
support.  Those efforts previously called OSKit-Mach are now working
towards the future version 2.0 of GNU Mach.

Aside from bug fixes, major changes from 1.2 (from the NEWS file) are:

The kernel now directly supports "boot scripts" in the form of multiboot
module names with the same syntax as the Hurd's `serverboot' program.
That is, instead of telling GRUB "module /boot/serverboot", you can give
GRUB a series of command like "module /hurd/ext2fs ${...}" where the
syntax after "module" is the same as in boot scripts for Hurd's `serverboot'.

The kernel message device `kmsg' is now enabled by default.
--disable-kmsg turns it off.

Large disks (>= 10GB) are now correctly supported, the new get_status
call DEV_GET_RECORDS can return the number of records of a device.

Lots of tweaks have been done to the virtual memory management to make
it perform better on today's machines.

The console supports ANSI escape sequences for colors and attributes.

Support for the terminal speeds B57600 and B115200 has been added.


Bug reports relating to this distribution should be sent to
address@hidden  Requests for assistance should be made on
address@hidden

The md5sum checksums for this distibution is

XXX  gnumach-1.3.tar.gz