Linux 4.15 Released

After a release cycle that was unusual in so many (bad) ways, thislast week was really pleasant. Quiet and small, and no last-minutepanics, just small fixes for various issues.  I never got a feelingthat I'd need to extend things by yet another week, and 4.15 looksfine to me.Half the changes in the last week were misc driver stuff (gpu, input,networking) with the other half being a mix of networking, core kerneland arch updates (mainly x86). But all of it is tiny.So at least we had one good week. This obviously was not a pleasantrelease cycle, with the whole meltdown/spectre thing coming in in themiddle of the cycle and not really gelling with our normal releasecycle. The extra two weeks were obviously mainly due to that wholetiming issue.Also, it is worth pointing out that it's not like we're "done" withspectre/meltdown. There is more work pending (arm, spectre-v1, miscdetails), and perhaps equally importantly, to actually get the biggestfix for the indirect branch mitigations, you need not just the kernelupdates, you need to have a compiler with support for the "retpoline"indirect branch model.You can do    cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/spectre_v2and if you don't have a compiler that supports the retpolinemitigations, you'll get:    Vulnerable: Minimal generic ASM retpolinebecause only the assembly code (not the C code) will have theretpoline mitigation. So keep that in mind.Anyway, while spectre/meltdown has obviously been the big news thisrelease cycle, it's worth noting that we obviously had all the*normal* updates going on too, and the work everywhere else didn'tjust magically stop, even if some developers have been distracted byCPU issues. In the *big* picture, 4.15 looks perfectly normal, withtwo thirds of the full 4.15 patch being about drivers, and even thearch updates are dominated by the arm DTS diffs, not by CPU bugmitigation.So the news cycle notwithstanding, the bulk of the 4.15 work is allthe regular plodding "boring" stuff. And I mean that in the bestpossible way. It may not be glamorous and get the headlines, but it'sthe bread and butter of kernel development, and is in many ways thereally important stuff.Go forth and play with it, things actually look pretty good despite everything.And obviously this also means that the merge window for 4.16 is open.I already have a number of pull requests pending that I will startmerging tomorrow. Hopefully we'll have a _normal_ and entirely boringrelease cycle for 4.16. Because boring really is good.                  Linus