Things continue to be fairly calm: rc5 is bigger than rc4 was, but rc4
really was tiny.
And while we’re back to fairly normal commit counts for this time in
the release window, the kinds of bugs people are finding remain very
low grade: there’s absolutely nothing scary in here. If things
continue this way, this might be one of those rare releases that don’t
even get to rc7. At least that’s how it feels now, although to be
honest I suspect that even if things continue this calm I’d do the
normal rc7 just because there’s no particular hurry or reason not to.
One pattern that is _very_ clear here is how the pull requests I get
are bunched up at the end of the week. More than half of all my pulls
were done Friday and particularly Saturday. I’m not complaining, I
think it’s just a sign of how there weren’t any particularly urgent
things going on this week, and so people send in their pull requests
at the end of the work-week and/or just knowing that the rc is coming
up.
Anyway, the bulk of the changes are to drivers as usual (at about 60%
– ethernet drivers stand out in the diffstat, but it’s pretty spread
out), with networking and tooling being most of the rest. There’s a
smattering of other small changes, and you can get a feel for the
details by skimming the appended shortlog.
Go out and test. It all looks very safe,
Linus