So it’s been two weeks since the merge window opened, and rc1 is out
there and thus the merge window is closed.
It may have been a slightly unusual two week merge window, in that
it’s only one week since the release of 3.15 and the first week
overlapped with the last -rc for that previous release, but that
doesn’t seem to have affected development much. Things look normal,
and if anything, this is one of the bigger release windows rather than
on the smaller side. It’s not quite as big as the merge window for
3.15, but it’s actually not that far off.
It also looks fairly usual from a statistics standpoint: about two
thirds of the changes are to drivers (and one third of *that* is to
staging), and half of the remainder is architecture updates (with arm
dominating, dts files leading – but there’s mips, powerpc, x86 and
arm64 there too).
Outside of drivers and architecture updates, there’s the usual mixture
of changes elsewhere: filesystems (mainly reiserfs, xfs, btrfs, nfs),
networking, “core” kernel (mm, locking, scheduler, tracing), and
tooling (perf and power, also new self-tests).
Also as usual, the shortlog is much too big to be generally useful and
posted as part of this announcement, but you can obviously look at the
details in git. I’m posting the “mergelog” as usual, which I think is
a slightly better way to see the high-level picture. And as usual, it
credits not the people who necessarily wrote the code, but the
submaintainers that sent it to me. For real credits, see the git tree.
Go forth and test,
Linus