I wish rc6 was smaller, but at the same time I'm just relieved that
Kirill found and fixed the problem with the THP cleanup series that
had plagued us this release cycle. So I can't really complain. Adding
to my relief is that another scary bug-report turned out to not be a
kernel bug at all, but a microcode issue. Which might perhaps be
worse, but at least it's not something we did (and now that it's known
it's avoidable).
The diffstat looks odd this time because there's a big patch to one of
the network driver header files that makes it look like the include
directory is almost 40% of the whole change. But that patch just
renames a ton of reserved fields, no actual code change.
Ignoring that oddity in the diffstat statistics, things look fairly
normal. Mostly drivers (networking and usb dominate, but there's some
gpu, sound, acpi fixes too), with the usual architecture updates (arc,
arm, x86) and some core networking. Some perf work, and a few
filesystem fixes (nfs, dax, some core vfs).
I'd like to say that things are on track for the usual release timing,
but let's see how things look next week. If rc7 hasn't started to
shrink, I may end up deciding that this is one of the releases when we
do an rc8 too. Too early to tell. There's nothing particularly scary
going on, but I'd have liked it even calmer this week.
Shortlog for rc6 appended as usual for the people who want to get an
overview of the details,
Linus
