I’m happy to say that things have calmed down a bit, and things look
to be on track.
Which didn’t actually seem to be the case at all earlier this week –
we had what appeared to be really nasty core bugs, and together with
rc6 being bigger than previous rc’s, I was really not feeling all that
good about this release there for a while.
But the worst “nasty bugs” ended up clearing up and not being kernel
bugs at all. One turned out to be a compiler issue (which is always
very scary and hard to debug and very annoying), and it even had a
fairly simple workaround so that we didn’t end up having to blacklist
compilers. Another turned out to be lockdep just being too aggressive,
and a false positive.
We obviously *do* have various real fixes in here, but none of them
look all that special or worrisome. And rc7 is finally noticeable
smaller than previous rc’s, so we clearly are calming down. So unlike
my early worries, this might well be the last rc, we’ll see how next
week looks/feels.
In numbers, rc7 is about one third arch (xtensa, powerpc, x86, s390,
blackfin), one third drivers (gpu, media, networking), and one third
“random” (networking, mm). But it’s all fairly small. Shortlog
appended.