Linux 4.14 rc5 | Linux Today

Linux 4.14 rc5

Written By
LT
Linus Torvalds
Oct 16, 2017
Things seem to be finally starting to calm down for 4.14.We've certainly had smaller rc5's, but we've had bigger ones too, andthis week finally felt fairly normal in a release that has up untilnow felt a bit messier than it perhaps should have been.So assuming this trend holds, we're all good. Knock wood.So what do we have here? A little bit of everything, but what might bemost noticeable is some more fixes for the whole new x86 TLB handlingdue to the ASID changes that came in this release. Some of the lazyTLB handling changes caused problems on a few AMD chips withparticular settings, because it was all a little bit *too* lazy influshing the TLB. Even when TLB entries aren't used (and will beflushed before any possible use), the TLB may be speculatively filled,and that can cause problems if we've already free'd the page tablesthat the speculative fill ends up looking up.The other thing perhaps worth mentioning is how much random fuzzingpeople are doing, and it's finding things. We've always done fuzzing(who remembers the old "crashme" program that just generated randomcode and jumped to it? We used to do that quite actively very earlyon), but people have been doing some nice targeted fuzzing of driversubsystems etc, and there's been various fixes (not just this lastweek either) coming out of those efforts. Very nice to see.Anyway, rc5 is out, and things look normal. We've got arch updates(mostly x86and poweerpc, but some mips), drivers (gpu, networking,usb, sound, misc), some core kernel (lockdep fixes, networking, mm)and some tooling (perf, selftests).Go out and test,               Linus
LT

Linus Torvalds

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