
NWFS 2.4.3 RELEASE NOTES
------------------------

NWFS is a work in progress.  TRG will continue to develop enhancements
and new features to NWFS in the future.  You are encouraged to report
bugs or requests for feature enhancements to jmerkey@timpanogas.com

This release supports Linux Kernels 2.0 and 2.2 and 2.4.  NWFS 2.4.3
source code can be downloaded from www.timpanogas.com or FTP at
207.109.151.240.

This is an interim release that contains bug fixes.  The next major 
release (2.5) uses a rapid mounting scheme with a journal that allows
NetWare volumes to be mounted rapidly and demand-paged rather than
needing to read the entire volume directory and name hashes into memory.  
The 2.5 version reduces memory usage to @ 1/80th of what we are using 
at present.   2.5 also supports files up to 256 tera-bytes in size 
depending on the OS architecture (Linux looks like 1TB max).

ENHANCEMENTS
-------------

This release corrects a bug in the TurboFAT indexes that could cause file 
corruption.  TurboFAT's keep a sliding pointer into the FAT chains of an
NWFS volume for rapid sequential file access.  This index stores the cluster offset and index last used by a read, write, or truncate to a fat chain.  There
was one case where a hash element could get reused with a stale TurboFAT
index that pointed to the previous file's fat chain.  This bug has been
corrected.

This release also corrects a bug in the rename() function.  This function 
was coded to exhibit NetWare behavior, i.e. when a target file exists 
under NetWare and rename is attempted, the rename fails with a 
'File Exists" return code.  Linux expects that the VFS above will have 
already done these checks, and assumes the underlying FS will simply 
delete a rename target if it already exsits.  The NWFS Linux VFS functions
in create.c have been changed to reproduce this Linux specific behavior.

The bit search lists and volume segment allocators have been optimized
to reduce bit list searching to under a dozen or so probes while looking
for free suballocation blocks or clusters on a NetWare volume.  This 
optimization allows for very fast bit block search times even on 
extremely large multi-segmented NetWare volumes.  

The suballocation FAT chains also have been enabled to use TurboFAT
indexing to speed suballoc read and write operations.

We will attempt to post the page cache code and a fix for the symlink
problem on 2.4.0-test5 tommorrow.


