So two weeks have passed, and the merge window for 4.19 is over.
This was a fairly frustrating merge window, partly because 4.19 looks
to be a pretty big release (no single reason), and partly just due to
random noise. We had the L1TF hw vulnerability disclosure early in the
merge window, which just added the usual frustration due to having
patches that weren't public. That just shows just how good all our
infrastructure for linux-next and various automated testing systems
have become, in how painful it is when it's lacking.
At least we didn't actually have a lot of problems on that front in
the mainline kernel, there seemed to be many more pain points in the
backports.
We also had a report of a TLB shootdown bug come in during this merge
window, and while the patches for ended up not being a huge problem,
TLB invalidation issues is actually one of the things that stresses me
out. They're really nasty to debug (thanks to Jann Horn for
pinpointing this one), and our interfaces to the architecture specific
routines are subtle and pretty complicated. And messy. I think the
discussion will result in a few cleanups later, but timing could have
been so much better for this.
Oh well. I guess I can partly just blame myself for having delayed
4.18 by a week, which just made everything happen during that first
and busiest week of the merge window. Bad luck. Although even the
second week - when things usually calm down - was also pretty busy
this time around.
Anyway, on to the actual changes. And there' a lot of them. There's
just a lot of things going on, and while this isn't the biggest
release we've had (4.9 still keeps that crown), this does join 4.12
and 4.15 as one of the bigger kernel releases, at least just judging
by number of commits in the merge window.
As usual, there's way too many patches to list even in shortlog
format, but appended is my usual "mergelog" of people I merged from
and a one-liner overview of the merge. There's actually a couple of
pull requests that I might still look at after the merge window, but
that are probably in the "there's always the next one" pile.
The "big picture" of the merge window looks pretty normal: just under
two thirds of the changes are to drivers (gpu and network drivers
being the bulk - as usual), with the rest being architecture updates
(all the usual suspects), filesystems, core kernel and networking.
There's a fair chunk of documentation and tooling updates too
(selftests, tracing, perf..).
Anyway, go forth and test,
Linus
