What's new and what changed in Cygwin 1.7
What's new and what changed from 1.7.9 to 1.7.10
Drop support for Windows NT4.
The CYGWIN environment variable options "envcache", "strip_title", "title",
"tty", and "upcaseenv" have been removed.
If the executable (and the system) is large address aware, the application heap
will be placed in the large memory area. The peflags tool
from the rebase package can be used to set the large
address awareness flag in the executable file header.
The registry setting "heap_chunk_in_mb" has been removed, in favor of a new
per-executable setting in the executable file header which can be set using the
peflags tool. See
for more information.
The CYGWIN=tty mode using pipes to communicate with the console in a pseudo
tty-like mode has been removed. Either just use the normal Windows console
as is, or use a terminal application like mintty.
New getconf command for querying confstr(3), pathconf(3),
sysconf(3), and limits.h configuration.
The passwd command now allows an administrator to use the -R command for
other user accounts: passwd -R username.
Pthread spinlocks. New APIs: pthread_spin_destroy, pthread_spin_init,
pthread_spin_lock, pthread_spin_trylock, pthread_spin_unlock.
Pthread stack address management. New APIs: pthread_attr_getstack,
pthread_attr_getstackaddr, pthread_attr_getguardsize, pthread_attr_setstack,
pthread_attr_setstackaddr, pthread_attr_setguardsize, pthread_getattr_np.
POSIX Clock Selection option. New APIs: clock_nanosleep,
pthread_condattr_getclock, pthread_condattr_setclock.
clock_gettime(3) and clock_getres(3) accept per-process and per-thread CPU-time
clocks, including CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID and CLOCK_THREAD_CPUTIME_ID.
New APIs: clock_getcpuclockid, pthread_getcpuclockid.
GNU/glibc error.h error reporting functions. New APIs: error, error_at_line.
New exports: error_message_count, error_one_per_line, error_print_progname.
Also, perror and strerror_r no longer clobber strerror storage.
/proc/loadavg now shows the number of currently running processes and the
total number of processes.
Added /proc/devices and /proc/misc, which lists supported device types and
their device numbers.
Added /proc/swaps, which shows the location and size of Windows paging file(s).
Added /proc/sysvipc/msg, /proc/sysvipc/sem, and /proc/sysvipc/shm which
provide information about System V IPC message queues, semaphores, and
shared memory.
/proc/version now shows the username of whomever compiled the Cygwin DLL
as well as the version of GCC used when compiling.
dlopen now supports the Glibc-specific RTLD_NODELETE and RTLD_NOOPEN flags.
Other new API: clock_settime, __fpurge, getgrouplist, ppoll, psiginfo,
psignal, ptsname_r, sys_siglist, pthread_setschedprio, sysinfo.
What's new and what changed from 1.7.8 to 1.7.9
New API: strchrnul.
What's new and what changed from 1.7.7 to 1.7.8
Drop support for Windows NT4 prior to Service Pack 4.
Reinstantiate Cygwin's ability to delete an empty directory which is the
current working directory of the same or another process. Same for any
other empty directory which has been opened by the same or another process.
Cygwin now ships the C standard library fenv.h header file, and implements the
related APIs (including GNU/glibc extensions): feclearexcept, fedisableexcept,
feenableexcept, fegetenv, fegetexcept, fegetexceptflag, fegetprec, fegetround,
feholdexcept, feraiseexcept, fesetenv, fesetexceptflag, fesetprec, fesetround,
fetestexcept, feupdateenv, and predefines both default and no-mask FP
environments. See the
GNU C Library manual for full details of this functionality.
Support for the C99 complex functions, except for the "long double"
implementations. New APIs: cacos, cacosf, cacosh, cacoshf, carg, cargf, casin,
casinf, casinh, casinhf, catan, catanf, catanh, catanhf, ccos, ccosf, ccosh,
ccoshf, cexp, cexpf, cimag, cimagf, clog, clogf, conj, conjf, cpow, cpowf,
cproj, cprojf, creal, crealf, csin, csinf, csinh, csinhf, csqrt, csqrtf, ctan,
ctanf, ctanh, ctanhf.
Fix the width of "CJK Ambiguous Width" characters to 1 for singlebyte charsets
and 2 for East Asian multibyte charsets. (For UTF-8, it remains dependent on
the specified language, and the "@cjknarrow" locale modifier can still be used
to force width 1.)
The strerror_r interface now has two flavors; if _GNU_SOURCE is
defined, it retains the previous behavior of returning char *
(but the result is now guaranteed to be NUL-terminated); otherwise
it now obeys POSIX semantics of returning int.
/proc/sys now allows unfiltered access to the native NT namespace. Access
restrictions still apply. Direct device access via /proc/sys is not yet
supported. File system access via block devices works. For instance
(note the trailing slash!)
bash$ cd /proc/sys/Device/HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy1/
Other new APIs: llround, llroundf, madvise, pthread_yield.
Export program_invocation_name, program_invocation_short_name.
Support TIOCGPGRP, TIOCSPGRP ioctls.
What's new and what changed from 1.7.6 to 1.7.7
Partially revert the 1.7.6 change to set the Win32 current working directory
(CWD) always to an invalid directory, since it breaks backward compatibility
too much. The Cygwin CWD and the Win32 CWD are now kept in sync again, unless
the Cygwin CWD is not usable as Win32 CWD. See the reworked
for details.
Make sure to follow the Microsoft security advisory concerning DLL hijacking.
See the Microsoft Security Advisory (2269637) "Insecure Library Loading Could Allow Remote Code Execution" for details.
Allow to link against -lbinmode instead of /lib/binmode.o. Same for
-ltextmode, -ltextreadmode and -lautomode.
See for details.
What's new and what changed from 1.7.5 to 1.7.6
Add new mount options "dos" and "ihash" to allow overriding Cygwin default
behaviour on broken filesystems not recognized by Cygwin.
Add new mount option "bind" to allow remounting parts of the POSIX file
hirarchy somewhere else.
Ttys and ptys are handled as securable objects using file-like permissions
and owner/group information. chmod and
chown now work on ttys/ptys. A new mechanism is used
to propagate pty handles safely to other processes, which does not require
to use Cygserver.
Pass on coresize settings made with setrlimit(2). This allows shells to
disable creating stackdump files in child processes via
ulimit -c 0 in bash or limit coredumpsize 0
in tcsh.
Locale categories contain all localization strings additionally as wide-char
strings. locale(1) prints these values just as on Linux. nl_langinfo(3)
allows to fetch them.
New interfaces mkostemp(3) and mkostemps(3) are added.
New virtual file /proc/filesystems.
clock_gettime(3) and clock_getres(3) accept CLOCK_MONOTONIC.
DEPRECATED with 1.7.7: Cygwin handles the current working directory entirely
on its own. The Win32 current working directory is set to an invalid path to
be out of the way. [...]
What's new and what changed from 1.7.3 to 1.7.5
Support for DEC Backarrow Key Mode escape sequences (ESC [ ? 67 h, ESC [ ? 67 l)
in Windows console.
What's new and what changed from 1.7.2 to 1.7.3
Support for GB2312/EUC-CN. These charsets are implemented as aliases to GBK.
GB2312 is now the default charset name for the locales zh_CN and zh_SG, just
as on Linux.
Modification and access timestamps of devices reflect the current time.
What's new and what changed from 1.7.1 to 1.7.2
Localization support has been much improved.
Cygwin now handles locales using the underlying Windows locale
support. The locale must exist in Windows to be recognized.
Locale aliases from the file /usr/share/locale/locale.alias are also
allowed, as long as their replacement is supported by the underlying Windows.
New tool "locale" to fetch locale information and default locales based on
the Windows default settings as well as lists of all supported locales
and character sets.
Default charset for locales without explicit charset is now chosen
from a list of Linux-compatible charsets.
For instance: en_US -> ISO-8859-1, ja_JP -> EUC-JP, zh_TW -> Big5.
Added support for the charsets GEORGIAN-PS, PT154, and TIS-620.
Support for the various locale modifiers to switch charsets as on Linux.
Default charset in the "C" or "POSIX" locale has been changed back
from UTF-8 to ASCII, to avoid problems with applications
expecting a singlebyte charset in the "C"/"POSIX" locale. Still use
UTF-8 internally for filename conversion in this case.
LC_COLLATE, LC_MONETARY, LC_NUMERIC, and LC_TIME localization is
enabled via Windows locale support. LC_MESSAGES is enabled via a big
table with localized strings.
fnmatch(3), regcomp(3), regexec(3) calls are now multibyte-aware.
printf(3), wprintf(3) families of functions now handle the grouping
flag, the apostrophe ', per POSIX-1.2008. The
integer portion of the result of a decimal conversion (%i, %d, %u, %f,
%F, %g, %G) will be formatted with thousands' grouping characters.
strftime(3), wcsftime(3), and strptime(3) now handle the E and O format
modifiers to print/scan alternative date and time representations or to
use alternative digits in locales which support this. Additionally these
functions now also support the padding modifiers '0' and '+', as well as
a field width per POSIX-1.2008.
New strfmon(3) call.
Support open(2) flags O_CLOEXEC and O_TTY_INIT flags. Support fcntl
flag F_DUPFD_CLOEXEC. Support socket flags SOCK_CLOEXEC and SOCK_NONBLOCK.
Add new Linux-compatible API calls accept4(2), dup3(2), and pipe2(2).
Support the signal SIGPWR.
Enhanced Windows console support.
The console's backspace keycode can be changed using 'stty erase'.
Function keys send distinguished escape sequences compatible with rxvt.
Keypad keys send distinguished escape sequences, xterm-style.
Support of combining Alt and AltGr modifiers in console window
(compatible with xterm and mintty), so that e.g. Alt-@ sends ESC @
also on keyboards where @ is mapped to an AltGr combination.
Report mouse wheel scroll events in mouse reporting mode 1000 (note:
this doesn't seem to work on all systems, assumedly due to driver
interworking issues).
Add mouse reporting mode 1002 to report mouse drag movement.
Add mouse reporting mode 1003 to report any mouse movement.
Add focus event reporting (mode 1004), compatible with xterm and mintty.
Add escape sequences for not bold (22), not invisible (28), not
blinking (25) (compatible with xterm and mintty).
Support VT100 line drawing graphics mode in console window (compatible
with xterm and mintty).
Handle native DOS paths always as if mounted with "posix=0,noacl".
Handle UNC paths starting with slashes identical to /cygdrive paths.
In other words, use the /cygdrive mount flags for these paths as well.
Recognize NWFS filesystem and workaround broken OS call.
New support for eXtensible Data Record (XDR) encoding and decoding,
as defined by RFCs 1014, 1832, and 4506. The XDR protocol and
functions are useful for cross-platfrom data exchange, and are
commonly used as the core data interchange format for Remote
Procedure Call (RPC) and NFS.
OS related changes
Windows 95, 98 and Me are not supported anymore. The new Cygwin 1.7 DLL
will not run on any of these systems.
Add support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
File Access related changes
Mount points are no longer stored in the registry. Use /etc/fstab and
/etc/fstab.d/$USER instead. Mount points created with mount(1) are only
local to the current session and disappear when the last Cygwin process
in the session exits.
Cygwin creates the mount points for /, /usr/bin, and /usr/lib
automatically from it's own position on the disk. They don't have to be
specified in /etc/fstab.
If a filename cannot be represented in the current character set, the
character will be converted to a sequence Ctrl-X + UTF-8 representation
of the character. This allows to access all files, even those not
having a valid representation of their filename in the current character
set. To always have a valid string, use the UTF-8 charset by
setting the environment variable $LANG, $LC_ALL, or $LC_CTYPE to a valid
POSIX value, such as "en_US.UTF-8".
PATH_MAX is now 4096. Internally, path names can be as long as the
underlying OS can handle (32K).
struct dirent now supports d_type, filled out with DT_REG or DT_DIR.
All other file types return as DT_UNKNOWN for performance reasons.
The CYGWIN environment variable options "ntsec" and "smbntsec" have been
replaced by the per-mount option "acl"/"noacl".
The CYGWIN environment variable option "ntea" has been removed without
substitute.
The CYGWIN environment variable option "check_case" has been removed in
favor of real case-sensitivity on file systems supporting it.
Creating filenames with special DOS characters '"', '*', ':', '<',
'>', '|' is supported.
Creating files with special DOS device filename components ("aux",
"nul", "prn") is supported.
File names are case sensitive if the OS and the underlying file system
supports it. Works on NTFS and NFS. Does not work on FAT and Samba
shares. Requires to change a registry key (see the User's Guide). Can
be switched off on a per-mount basis.
Due to the above changes, managed mounts have been removed.
Incoming DOS paths are always handled case-insensitive and get no POSIX
permission, as if they are mounted with noacl,posix=0 mount flags.
unlink(2) and rmdir(2) try very hard to remove files/directories even if
they are currently accessed or locked. This is done by utilizing the
hidden recycle bin directories and marking the files for deletion.
rename(2) rewritten to be more POSIX conformant.
access(2) now performs checks using the real user ID, as required by
POSIX; the old behavior of querying based on effective user ID is
available through the new faccessat(2) and euidaccess(2) APIs.
Add st_birthtim member to struct stat.
File locking is now advisory, not mandatory anymore. The fcntl(2) and
the new lockf(2) APIs create and maintain locks with POSIX semantics,
the flock(2) API creates and maintains locks with BSD semantics. POSIX
and BSD locks are independent of each other.
Implement atomic O_APPEND mode.
New open(2) flags O_DIRECTORY, O_EXEC and O_SEARCH.
Make the "plain file with SYSTEM attribute set" style symlink default
again when creating symlinks. Only create Windows shortcut style
symlinks if CYGWIN=winsymlinks is set in the environment.
Symlinks now use UTF-16 encoding for the target filename for better
internationalization support. Cygwin 1.7 can read all old style
symlinks, but the new style is not compatible with older Cygwin
releases.
Handle NTFS native symlinks available since Vista/2008 as symlinks (but
don't create Vista/2008 symlinks due to unfortunate OS restrictions).
Recognize NFS shares and handle them using native mechanisms. Recognize
and create real symlinks on NFS shares. Get correct stat(2) information
and set real mode bits on open(2), mkdir(2) and chmod(2).
Recognize MVFS and workaround problems manipulating metadata and handling
DOS attributes.
Recognize Netapp DataOnTap drives and fix inode number handling.
Recognize Samba version beginning with Samba 3.0.28a using the new
extended version information negotiated with the Samba developers.
Stop faking hardlinks by copying the file on filesystems which don't
support hardlinks natively (FAT, FAT32, etc.). Just return an error
instead, just like Linux.
List servers of all accessible domains and workgroups in // instead of
just the servers in the own domain/workgroup.
Support Linux-like extended attributes ([fl]getxattr, [fl]listxattr,
[fl]setxattr, [fl]removexattr).
New file conversion API for conversion from Win32 to POSIX path and vice
versa (cygwin_conv_path, cygwin_create_path, cygwin_conv_path_list).
New openat family of functions: openat, faccessat, fchmodat, fchownat,
fstatat, futimesat, linkat, mkdirat, mkfifoat, mknodat, readlinkat,
renameat, symlinkat, unlinkat.
Other new APIs: posix_fadvise, posix_fallocate, funopen, fopencookie,
open_memstream, open_wmemstream, fmemopen, fdopendir, fpurge, mkstemps,
eaccess, euidaccess, canonicalize_file_name, fexecve, execvpe.
Network related changes
New implementation for blocking sockets and select on sockets which is
supposed to allow POSIX-compatible sharing of sockets between threads
and processes.
send/sendto/sendmsg now send data in 64K chunks to circumvent an
internal buffer problem in WinSock (KB 201213).
New send/recv option MSG_DONTWAIT.
IPv6 support. New APIs getaddrinfo, getnameinfo, freeaddrinfo,
gai_strerror, in6addr_any, in6addr_loopback. On IPv6-less systems,
replacement functions are available for IPv4. On systems with IPv6
enabled, the underlying WinSock functions are used. While I tried hard
to get the functionality as POSIXy as possible, keep in mind that a
*fully* conformant implementation of getaddrinfo and other stuff is only
available starting with Windows Vista/2008.
Resolver functions (res_init, res_query, res_search, res_querydomain,
res_mkquery, res_send, dn_comp, dn_expand) are now part of Cygwin.
Applications don't have to link against minires anymore. Actually, this
*is* the former libminires.a.
rcmd is now implemented inside of Cygwin, instead of calling the WinSock
function. This allows rsh(1) usage on Vista/2008 and later, which
dropped this function from WinSock.
Define multicast structures in netinet/in.h. Note that fully conformant
multicast support is only available beginning with Vista/2008.
Improve get_ifconf. Redefine struct ifreq and subsequent datastructures
to be able to keep more information. Support SIOCGIFINDEX,
SIOCGIFDSTADDR and the Cygwin specific SIOCGIFFRNDLYNAM. Support real
interface flags on systems supporting them.
Other new APIs: bindresvport, bindresvport_sa, gethostbyname2,
iruserok_sa, rcmd_af, rresvport_af. getifaddrs, freeifaddrs,
if_nametoindex, if_indextoname, if_nameindex, if_freenameindex.
Add /proc/net/if_inet6.
Device related changes
Reworked pipe implementation which uses overlapped IO to create more
reliable interruptible pipes and fifos.
The CYGWIN environment variable option "binmode" has been removed.
Improved fifo handling by using native Windows named pipes.
Detect when a stdin/stdout which looks like a pipe is really a tty.
Among other things, this allows a debugged application to recognize that
it is using the same tty as the debugger.
Support UTF-8 in console window.
In the console window the backspace key now emits DEL (0x7f) instead of
BS (0x08), Alt-Backspace emits ESC-DEL (0x1b,0x7f) instead of DEL
(0x7f), same as the Linux console and xterm. Control-Space now emits an
ASCII NUL (0x0) character.
Support up to 64 serial interfaces using /dev/ttyS0 - /dev/ttyS63.
Support up to 128 raw disk drives /dev/sda - /dev/sddx.
New API: cfmakeraw, get_avphys_pages, get_nprocs, get_nprocs_conf,
get_phys_pages, posix_openpt.
Other POSIX related changes
A lot of character sets are supported now via a call to setlocale().
The setting of the environment variables $LANG, $LC_ALL or $LC_CTYPE
will be used. For instance, setting $LANG to "de_DE.ISO-8859-15" before
starting a Cygwin session will use the ISO-8859-15 character set in the
entire session. The default locale in the absence of one of the
aforementioned environment variables is "C.UTF-8".
The full list of supported character sets: "ASCII", "ISO-8859-x" with x
in 1-16, except 12, "UTF-8", Windows codepages "CPxxx", with xxx in
(437, 720, 737, 775, 850, 852, 855, 857, 858, 862, 866, 874, 1125, 1250,
1251, 1252, 1253, 1254, 1255, 1256, 1257, 1258), "KOI8-R", "KOI8-U",
"SJIS", "GBK", "eucJP", "eucKR", and "Big5".
Allow multiple concurrent read locks per thread for pthread_rwlock_t.
Implement pthread_kill(thread, 0) as per POSIX.
New API for POSIX IPC: Named semaphores: sem_open, sem_close,
sem_unlink. Message queues: mq_open, mq_getattr, mq_setattr, mq_notify,
mq_send, mq_timedsend, mq_receive, mq_timedreceive, mq_close, mq_unlink.
Shared memory: shm_open, shm_unlink.
Only declare expected functions in <strings.h>, don't include
<string.h> from here.
Support for WCONTINUED, WIFCONTINUED() added to waitpid and wait4.
New APIs: _Exit, confstr, insque, remque, sys_sigabbrev, posix_madvise,
posix_memalign, reallocf, exp10, exp10f, pow10, pow10f, lrint, lrintf,
rint, rintf, llrint, llrintf, llrintl, lrintl, rintl, mbsnrtowcs,
strcasestr, stpcpy, stpncpy, wcpcpy, wcpncpy, wcsnlen, wcsnrtombs,
wcsftime, wcstod, wcstof, wcstoimax, wcstok, wcstol, wcstoll, wcstoul,
wcstoull, wcstoumax, wcsxfrm, wcscasecmp, wcsncasecmp, fgetwc, fgetws,
fputwc, fputws, fwide, getwc, getwchar, putwc, putwchar, ungetwc,
asnprintf, dprintf, vasnprintf, vdprintf, wprintf, fwprintf, swprintf,
vwprintf, vfwprintf, vswprintf, wscanf, fwscanf, swscanf, vwscanf,
vfwscanf, vswscanf.
Security related changes
Getting a domain user's groups is hopefully more bulletproof now.
Cygwin now comes with a real LSA authentication package. This must be
manually installed by a privileged user using the /bin/cyglsa-config
script. The advantages and disadvantages are noted in
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-developers/2006-11/msg00000.html
Cygwin now allows storage and use of user passwords in a hidden area of
the registry. This is tried first when Cygwin is called by privileged
processes to switch the user context. This allows, for instance, ssh
public key sessions with full network credentials to access shares on
other machines.
New options have been added to the mkpasswd and mkgroup tools to ease
use in multi-machine and multi-domain environments. The existing
options have a slightly changed behaviour.
Miscellaneous
New ldd utility, similar to Linux.
New link libraries libdl.a, libresolv.a, librt.a.
Fallout from the long path names: If the current working directory is
longer than 260 bytes, or if the current working directory is a virtual
path (like /proc, /cygdrive, //server), don't call native Win32 programs
since they don't understand these paths.
On the first usage of a DOS path (C:\foo, \\foo\bar), the Cygwin DLL
emits a scary warning that DOS paths shouldn't be used. This warning
may be disabled via the new CYGWIN=nodosfilewarning setting.
The CYGWIN environment variable option "server" has been removed.
Cygwin automatically uses cygserver if it's available.
Allow environment of arbitrary size instead of a maximum of 32K.
Don't force uppercase environment when started from a non-Cygwin
process. Except for certain Windows and POSIX variables which are
always uppercased, preserve environment case. Switch back to old
behaviour with the new CYGWIN=upcaseenv setting.
Detect and report a missing DLL on process startup.
Add /proc/registry32 and /proc/registry64 paths to access 32 bit and 64
bit registry on 64 bit systems.
Add the ability to distinguish registry keys and registry values with
the same name in the same registry subtree. The key is called "foo" and
the value will be called "foo%val" in this case.
Align /proc/cpuinfo more closly to Linux content.
Add /proc/$PID/mounts entries and a symlink /proc/mounts pointing to
/proc/self/mounts as on Linux.
Optimized strstr and memmem implementation.
Remove backwards compatibility with old signal masks. (Some *very* old
programs which use signal masks may no longer work correctly).
Cygwin now exports wrapper functions for libstdc++ operators new and
delete, to support the toolchain in implementing full C++ standards
conformance when working with shared libraries.
Different Cygwin installations in different paths can be run in parallel
without knowing of each other. The path of the Cygwin DLL used in a
process is a key used when creating IPC objects. So different Cygwin
DLLs are running in different namespaces.
Each Cygwin DLL stores its path and installation key in the registry.
This allows troubleshooting of problems which could be a result of
having multiple concurrent Cygwin installations.