Ok, the two-week merge period is over, and -rc1 is out
there.
I’m really hoping that we can keep the
2.6.20 release calmer and without any of the
dragging-out-due-to-core-changes that we’ve had lately. We didn’t
actually merge any really core changes here, with the biggest
conceptual one being the “work_struct” split into regular work and
“delayed” work, so I’m hoping we can really end up with an easy
2.6.20 release.
Some of the commits there are pretty big patches, but more than
a couple of them are due to fairly straightforward
search-and-replace things (like a largely scripted removal of
unnecessary casts of the return value of “kmalloc()”, for example,
or the switch to “ktermios” for the tty layer, or the introduction
of “struct path” in the VFS layer instead of keeping the
f_{dentry,vfsmnt} entries separate, or indeed the removal of
SLAB_xxx constant names in favour of the standard GFP_xxx
ones).
So while the patch itself isn’t actually all that much smaller
than usual, at least my personal gut feel is that the actual
changes are not as intrusive, just in some cases have big
diffs.
But both the diffstat and the shortlog are still too big to fit
in the kernel mailing list limits, so you’ll just have to take my
word for it. Or get the git repo, and do your own delving into
things with
git log v2.6.19..v2.6.20-rc1
| git shortlog
There are a few areas of note:
- the aforementioned “workqueue” changes (where we still have
some work to do to finalize the proper actions on all
architectures: it’s being somewhat discussed on the arch mailing
lists, hopefully we’ll have it all resolved by -rc2, and it doesn’t
really worry me) - lockless page cache (RCU lookups of radix trees)
- kvm driver for all those crazy virtualization people to play
with - networking updates (DCCP, address-family agnostic connection
tracking in netfilter, sparse byte order annotations, yadda
yadda) - HID layer separated out of the USB stuff (bluetooth apparently
wants the HID stuff too) - tons and tons of driver (ftape removal, ATA, pcmcia, i2c,
infiniband, dvb, networking..) and architecture updates (arm, mips,
powerpc, sh)
and probably some I just forgot about entirely.
Linus