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, and
this week finally felt fairly normal in a release that has up until
now 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 be
most noticeable is some more fixes for the whole new x86 TLB handling
due to the ASID changes that came in this release. Some of the lazy
TLB handling changes caused problems on a few AMD chips with
particular settings, because it was all a little bit *too* lazy in
flushing the TLB. Even when TLB entries aren't used (and will be
flushed before any possible use), the TLB may be speculatively filled,
and that can cause problems if we've already free'd the page tables
that the speculative fill ends up looking up.
The other thing perhaps worth mentioning is how much random fuzzing
people are doing, and it's finding things. We've always done fuzzing
(who remembers the old "crashme" program that just generated random
code and jumped to it? We used to do that quite actively very early
on), but people have been doing some nice targeted fuzzing of driver
subsystems etc, and there's been various fixes (not just this last
week 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
