Tuesday, March 14, 2017

man-pages-4.10 is released

I've released man-pages-4.10. 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, reviews, and comments from over 40 contributors. This release sees a large number of changes: over 600 commits changing around 160 pages. The changes include the addition of 11 pages, significant rewrites of 3 other pages, and enhancements to many other pages.

Among the more significant changes in man-pages-4.10 are the following:

  • The pages—add_key(2)keyctl(2), and request_key(2)—describing the system calls for the kernel key-management facility have been substantially revised and extended. The keyctl(2) page consequently saw a tenfold increase in size. I did much of the work here, with a lot of help from Eugene Syromyatnikov.
  • In cooperation with David Howells, the maintainer of the libkeyutils package (and the developer of the kernel key management facility), a number of pages in the libkeyutils package were moved to the man-pages project. The rationale for this change is that these pages describe kernel interfaces, and so man-pages is more reasonably their home. During the migration, many of these pages were also substantially enhanced. The migrated pages are: keyrings(7)persistent-keyring(7)process-keyring(7), session-keyring(7)thread-keyring(7)user-keyring(7), and user-session-keyring(7). Thanks to David Howells and Eugene Syromyatnikov for a lot of assistance with reworking the pages.
  • I've added a new ioctl_iflags(2) page which describes inode flags (the attributes manipulated by the chattr(1) command) and the ioctl() operations for working with those flags.
  • The details on the ioctl() operations that can be used with namespaces have been moved from the namespaces(7) page into a new ioctl_ns(2) page
  • I've written a getentropy(3) page, which describes the new getentropy() function added in glibc version 2.25. This function, layered on top of the getrandom(2) system call, enables the caller to obtain bytes of randomness.
  • The discussion of async-signal-safety has been moved out of the signal(7) manual page into a new new signal-safety(7) page. Along the way, some details have been added to the page, including discussion of a few glibc deviations from the POSIX standard.