So I should probably have delayed this until Wednesday for sentimental
reasons: that will be 23 years since I uploaded the 0.01 source tree.
But I’m not an overly sentimental person, so screw that. I’m doing my
normal Sunday release.
And as I mentioned in the rc4 notes, the previous rc was pretty small,
possibly because neither Greg nor Davem had sent in any updates that
week. Guess what? David’s networking updates came in an hour after I
did rc4, and sure enough Greg came in this week too, so – surprise
surprise – rc5 isn’t as small as rc4 was.
Oh well. It was too good to last.
I also got a report of an *old* performance regression in the dentry
cache (since 3.10 – positively ancient), and that in turn made me look
around some more, and there were a few other special cases that could
cause us to not do as well as we should. I fixed some of it, and Al
fixed the rest. So hopefully we not only fixed the reported
regression, but are actually doing better than we used to.
Anyway, the size of rc5 means that I’m certainly not cutting the
release early, which means that I will have to think about exactly
what I will do about the next merge window. Because it looks like it
might end up conflicting with my travel around LinuxCon EU. I haven’t
quite decided what I’ll do – I might release 3.17 normally, but then
just not open the merge window due to travel. Or, if there are more
issues than I think there will be, maybe I’ll delay the 3.17 release.
We’ll see.
Regardless – the rc5 changes is about half drivers (networking, gpu,
usb, input, ata..) with the rest being mostly a mix of filesystem
updates (the aforementioned performance thing in the core vfs layer,
but also some NFS export issues found by Al and misc other stuff),
architecture updates (arm, parisc, s390) and core networking. And a
smattering of other. Shortlog appended.
In other words, things look fairly normal, even if I’d have been
happier with rc5 being smaller. But with the bump from networking and
drivers, I’m not going to claim that this was either unexpected or
particularly scary. I’m hoping we’re done now, and that rc6 and rc7
will be noticeably calmer.
Knock wood.
Linus