Linux 0.99 patchlevel 14 is available on nic.funet.fi in the usual place
(pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus).  There are no diffs relative to pl13, as
too much has changed (the directory structure changed and the sound
driver was added).  Diffs relative to the last ALPHA version (13t) are
in the "pl13-ALPHA's" subdirectory along with the actual ALPHA versions.

The changes to pl13t are rather minor: most of them are just more printf
format fixes to make gcc-2.5.x happy (Chip Salzenberg).  Only one very
minor bugfix which made pl13t not notice the WP bit on a 486.

It would seem to be a good idea to use gcc-2.5.x to compile the kernel,
as that seems to fix at least one known bug in earlier gcc versions.  I
hope that pl14 will be even more stable than pl13 has turned out to be,
and especially the networking code seems to have become much more
dependable.  Thanks Alan & co.

Changes to the last official release (p13) are too numerous to mention
(or even to remember), but they include NTP support, updated SCSI and
networking drivers, >16MB swap area handling, added sound support,
read-only HPFS filesystem, memory management cleanups (especially
cleaned up mmap() some more).  Also, pl14 contains updated ext2fs code,
along with minor fixes (especially concerning the time values) in other
filesystems, and fixed unnamed/named pipe select() semantics.

The reorganizations include moving all device drivers to a subdirectory
of their own (linux/drivers), centralizing the major number handling
(<linux/major.h> etc...  Possibly cleaner and/or easier to keep track of
different drivers.  Finally, the first 4kB of physical memory is no
longer cleared on bootup: tytso reports that this feature now enables
some portables to use the power-saving features under linux.  This could
also be useful for the DOS emulator to check where the interrupt
pointers pointed at startup.

                        Linus

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