Linux 3.11 rc2 | Linux Today

Linux 3.11 rc2

Written By
LT
Linus Torvalds
Jul 23, 2013
Subject Linux 3.11-rc2
From Linus Torvalds <>
So it's been another week, and -rc2 is out there.The patch looks a bit odd, because by bulk 95% of the patch is justthe removal of the CSR staging driver that wasn't getting anytraction, so the diffstat (and the dirstat in particular) is not veryinteresting or readable, since that driver removal basicallyovershadows everything else. But I do admit to love seeing coderemoval patches.And of the rest of the patch, a noticeable part is all thoseone-liners all over that just remove the __cpuinit markers that peopleagreed were just more pain than gain to maintain. We had already madethe markers be no-ops earlier, so they didn't matter for codegeneration, and here in rc2 they get actually removed.End result: we have two separate events that generate a lot of noisein the patch, but aren't really interesting per se. They do make thepatch harder to read, though.Ignoring those noisy parts of the patch, there's a couple of thingsworth noting about rc2. I think most of the patches here are nicefixes, but I wanted to give two heads-ups: (a) the O_TMPFILE flag that is new to 3.11 has been going through afew ABI/API cleanups (and a few fixes to the implementation too), butI think we're done now. So if you're interested in the concept ofunnamed temporary files, go ahead and test it out. The lack of namenot only gets rid of races/complications with filename generation, itcan make the whole thing more efficient since you don't have thedirectory operations that can cause serializing IO etc. (b) we had a late change to how ACPI backlight handling is done oncertain machines, and while this kind of thing really shouldn't bedone outside the merge window, I ended up pulling it anyway. But I'd*really* like to have people test this thing particularly on laptopswith intel-based graphics. It should only matter (and hopefullyimprove things) for the newer ones with BIOSes designed for Windows 8,but hey, the more testing, the better. Backlight handling has beenpainful before, so I'm mentioning this explicitly.Anyway, apart from those two issues, I think the rest is pretty normalfor rc2. It started out a bit slow, but I think it ended up fairlynormal. Apart from the already mentioned issues, we've got drm stuff(radeon in particular), some driver core fixes, s390/mips/arm/x86updates, sound drivers, ext4/btrfs fixes, yadda yadda.The shortlog since -rc1 is appended.                           Linus
LT

Linus Torvalds

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