We're getting up there to the later rc's, but it's looking like 4.2
might be one of the releases needing more than the usual seven rc
releases - things aren't calming down like I would wish, and we've
still had some fairly annoying issues pop up.
For example, there was a core VFS fix merged just yesterday - the bug
itself was old, but some changes in this merge window ended up
triggering it much more easily. There's a pending i915 MST DP
regression that is papered around for now, but that still needs work,
and we had some fairly subtle fallout from the low-level x86 cleanups
and NMI. There's also a pending question about some of the VM
changes.
None of this is particularly disastrous or nasty, and the issues are
hard to hit and fairly small details, so it's not like I'm
particularly worried. But it's just more than I wish was going on at
this stage of the release. Maybe in two weeks when rc7 rolls around,
I will be happier and feel like things are going smoothly and I'm
getting comfy with making the final 4.2, but right now I feel like I
really want things to calm down and these issues not pop up.
Anyway, apart from that slight unease, things are fairly normal. Not a
lot of arch noise this time(apart from the aforementioned NMI fallout
on x86) - so just over three quarters of the changes are drivers, with
drm, infiniband, networking and scsi leading the charge. The rest is
mostly filesystem and networking code.
The shortlog is appended, it gives a reasonable overview of the details.
Please do keep testing things. And know that if you send me a pull
request that I deem questionable, I might not react politely. We
really need to calm things down (not that this rc5 is all _that_ big),
Linus
