Tuesday, December 29, 2015

man-pages-4.04 is released

I've released man-pages-4.04. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.

This release resulted from patches, bug reports,and  comments from more than 30 contributors. As well as a large number of minor fixes to nearly 90 man pages, the more significant changes in man-pages-4.04 include the following:

  • The futex(2) man page was long in a sorry state, with many aspects of the system call undocumented in the man page. After more than a year working off and on (and more than 250 commits!), I've completed a major rewrite and expansion of the page (which is now nearly 6 times as long as it used to be). Some of the information was drawn from Ulrich Drepper's highly informative paper, Futexes are tricky. A lot more information came from reading kernel and user-space source code, doing some experimenting (the revised man page even includes an example program!), and significant input from a number of reviewers (special thanks here to Thomas Gleixner and Torvald Riegel).
  • A new membarrier(2) man page was added, contributed by Mathieu Desnoyers, the developer of the new system call (added in Linux 4.3).
  • Eric Munson added documentation of the new mlock2() system call and the new mlockall() MCL_ONFAULT flag to the mlock(2) man page.

Saturday, December 5, 2015

man-pages-4.03 is released

I've released man-pages-4.03. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.

This release is relatively small, but nevertheless nearly 40 people contributed patches, bug reports,and comments. The more significant changes in man-pages-4.03 include the following:

  • Vince Weaver has once again been very active on the perf_event_open(2) page, making many updates related to recent kernel changes.
  • Documentation of the ambient capabilities feature that was added in Linux 4.3 has been added to the capabilities(7) and prctl(2) pages.