Ok, another week has gone by, and here's the promised rc8.
I'm still hoping that this will be the last rc, despite all the
Meltdown and Spectre hoopla. But we will just have to see, it
obviously requires this upcoming week to not come with any huge
surprises.
The patches aren't huge, but architecture updates do end up being a
largish part. That's partly due to the x86 "retpoline" support (well,
the basic stuff that is uncontested), but also because the powerpc
people decided they wanted to play too, so there's some low-level
kernel entry changes there too. Aren't we lucky?
Oh, and there's a small RISC-V update too.
But outside of that, we've got driver updates (gpu, networking, usb,
sound, NVMe), some core networking, and some tooling updates (mostly a
few new x86 selftests). And some random misc fixlets (documentation,
apparmor, crypto).
Go forth and test. It all looks pretty solid to me,
Linus
