It’s been a normal merge window, and I’m releasing according to the
normal schedule. The few days of travel didn’t seem to matter, as I
had internet access at all times.
The merge window is pretty normal in terms of what got merged too.
Just eyeballing the size, it looks like this is going to fit right in
– while 4.0 was a bit smaller than usual, 4.1 seems to be smack dab in
the middle of the normal range for the last couple of years. And all
the patch statistics look normal as well: the bulk of the changes are
to drivers (just under 60% of the patch), with arch updates being
about 20% of it all, and the rest is spread all over.
No earth-shattering new features come to mind, even if initial support
for ACPI on arm64 looks funny. Depending on what you care about, your
notion of “big new feature” may differ from mine, of course. There’s a
lot of work all over, and some of it might just make a big difference
to your use cases.
So go out and test. Even -rc1, as raw as it may sometimes be, has
tended to be pretty good. It’s not that scary. Promise.
Linus