Linux 4.15 rc1

o it's been the usual two weeks of merge window, and rc1 is out.And that normal time length is about the only thing usual about thismerge window. Because of the indiscriminate mass slaughter of turkeysin the US last week, lots of people - including me - were on vacation.That meant that I had asked for people to try to make the merge windowfront-heavy, but it also meant that then during the second week I wasrather more strict than usual in what I pulled.In particular, it mean that developers that sent pull requests in thesecond week that weren't just follow-up fixes ended up getting morescrutiny than usual. In particular, if I got a late pull request, Irequired that the thing had actually been in linux-next, since one ofthe effects of traveling with a laptop is that I don't end up doingthe usual full module builds in between every pull.The good news is that almost all major updates did come in during thefirst week. A big "Thank you" for that to the people involved. I couldstart my travels seeing that I only had a few hundred commits inlinux-next that hadn't been merged already.And in fact, I really liked the whole "if you send me stuff late, ithad better have been in linux-next" policy. It was slightlyinconvenient this time around because I hadn't actually automated thechecks, so doing the whole validation actually took more time andeffort on my part than it would have taken to just pull things, whichto some degree was counter-productive on my part, since the wholepoint was that I had less time than usual during the second week. Butat the same time I _really_ didn't want to encourage people to sendstuff late.The _other_ unexpected thing about this merge window was that it waspretty big. I had expected a largish drop-off after the 4.14 LTSrelease, like we had with 4.9. But that never happened, probablybecause 4.14 wasn't as huge a release as 4.9 was (it was just somewhatpainful in taking much too long to calm down).Anyway, if I missed something last week, just remind me and let meknow - I might do late pulls. But as mentioned, people really did seemto be pretty good about front-loading the merge window and I thinkwe're good to go.Go forth and test, and hopefully 4.15 will not have the calming-downdelays that 4.14 had.                Linus