So the -rc2’s have lately been pretty small – looking more like late
-rc’s than early ones. It *used* to be that I couldn’t even post the
shortlog, because it was just too big. That’s not been the case for
the last few releases.
I think people tend to take a breather after the merge window, because
the -rc3’s tend to then be a bit bigger again. But it may just also be
that I’ve just gotten much better at saying “the merge window is over,
I’m not taking random stragglers”, or that people are just getting
better at keeping to the merge window. Whatever the reason, the time
of huge -rc2’s seems to be happily behind us.
So in the 4.1 development cycle we match that new pattern. Even if
it’s not *quite* as tiny as, say, 3.19-rc2 was (that was really an
extreme outlier), 4.10-rc2 is pretty small, and things have generally
been fairly quiet. The diffstat is also pretty flat and clean, with
the notable exception of the new s390 sha512-based prng. I suspect I
should have chomped down on that one too. But the rest really looks
like “small fixes”, no big new chunks of code.
As usual, it’s a mixture of driver fixes, arch updates (with s390
really standing out due to that one prng commit), and some filesystem
and networking. The attached shortlog gives the details, there’s
nothing particularly worrisome here. So far 4.1 looks fairly normal.
Linus