So it's actually been a pretty good week, and I'm not really unhappy
with any of the patches that came in.
But to actually have decided that we don't need an rc8 this release,
it would have had to be really totally quiet, and it wasn't. Nothing
looks scary, but we did have a few reverts in here still, and I'll
just feel happier giving 4.14 another final week.
.. and I really hope that _will_ be the final week, and we don't find
anything new scary.
I don't think we will.
This rc8 does mean that the latter half of the next merge window will
be during the Thanksgiving week, when I'm on vacation with the family.
We'll see how that goes. I'm hoping that people will just send me
stuff early (particularly since there's now an extra week of 4.14),
and that I'll have a sufficient bulk of merging done the first week
that me traveling with a laptop doesn't even really impact the merge
window.
And if not, and I have trouble handling it, I may have to just extend
the merge window a bit. We've done this before, it's inconvenient but
not the end of the world.
Anyway, on to rc8: the diffstat actually looks huge, because I did
take the first round of SPDX markings (nicely scriptable and legible
license tags), so there's a lot of added one-liners to a large number
of files. That will keep happening for a while.
But that obviously doesn't actually change any code, although it did
trigger a trivial build change.
Those one-liner spdx additions do kind of obscure the real changes,
though, if you look at the diff. You can get a fairly good overview
from skimming the appended shortlog instead, and it's all pretty
small: most of it is some minor arch fixes, with a smattering of
networking and driver (sound, drm, mmc, clk, networking) updates. MIPS
shows up, mainly due to some email address updates (due to the
imgtec.com -> mips.com update). The rest is tooling, docs, and misc
(key handling, some vm fixes, etc).
One thing I got complaints about and was clearly not popular was how
/proc/cpuinfo didn't give useful frequencies on x86 any more since
4.13 - that got fixed (and backported to stable). Maybe that's the
most noticeable one to most people - the rest really is small internal
bug fixes.
Go forth and test,
Linus
