Linux 4.14 rc3

So 4.14 continues to be a somewhat painful release, and I'm startingto at least partly blame the fact that it's meant to be an LTSrelease.The last LTS release we had (4.9) resulted in one of the biggestkernel releases we ever had because everybody wanted in; the 4.14release doesn't seem to be as large, but it does seem to result insome late work happening because people want to prep for 4.14, knowingit will be LTS.But who knows. Some of this may just be pure coincidence too. But Ialready know of two more pull requests that are still pending thatwill also probably want to be pushed into 4.14.Anyway, on to the actual rc3 changes.. Most of them are the normalsmall fixes, but a few things do stand out: - some x86 FPU state handling fixes - fixed some crypto problems in our internal key handling - some smp/hotplug cleanupsand all of them are bigger than I would have wished for at this stage,but all of them had fine reasons for going in now. They all had onething in common, in that they also came with cleanups in order to fixthe underlying problem (so often the actual commit that _fixes_ it ispretty small, but there's a series of cleanups that makes that fixpossible).The two issues that I know as potentially still pending are some ofthe same kind: a writeback fix and some watchdog fixes, both with themajority being cleanups in order to fix things.Anyway, this all has the common thread that I'd have loved to get thatcode during the merge window as "obviously good changes", but I'm notthrilled to get it during the rc stages.Oh well. Enough of the "Woe is me".Things don't actually look *bad*. Yes, it's more changes than I wouldhave wished for at this stage, but at the same time none of it lookslike it's really fundamentally problematic for the 4.14 release. Mostof the x86 FPU state cleanups had already been around for a while justbecause they were needed cleanup, for example, it's just that the bugfixes made them get merged at a less than optimal time.The various changes do end up making the diffstat look somewhatunusual: driver fixes that usually dominate are just a quarter of thehaul this rc around, with arch fixes (almost all of which are x86) areanother quarter. The rest is core kernel (much of it the smp/hotplugupdates), security (the key handling changes) and tooling (much of itperf, but also more selftests). Some fs fixes (btrfs and xfs, somemisc) accounts for the rest.It's still early enough in the rc release that I don't know if thiswill impact timing. Right now it still feels like we're fine with theusual schedule (ie rc7 being the last rc), but we'll just have to seehow this release cycle continues.Do go out and test, please.                    Linus