This time around we have a fairly big change to the vfs layer that allows filesystems (if they
buy into it) to do readdir() and path component lookup in parallel
within the same directory.
That's probably the biggest conceptual vfs change we've had since we
started doing cached pathname lookups using RCU.
That said, the actual *code* changes for that all are fairly small,
and are dwarfed by all the usual driver updates. In fact, none of the
filesystem updates even show up on the default "dirstat" statistics
(because git dirstat by default cuts off showing things at 3%). So
when it comes to the bulk of the work, we have the usual distribution:
about two thirds drivers (gpu and network drivers dominate, but it's
all over) and the rest is mostly arch updates, documentation,
networking, and "misc" (which is where the vfs changes are hiding).
While this isn't a huge release, it's certainly big enough that even
the shortlog is much too big to post or read to get an overview, so
appended is my normal mergelog summary. And as such, remember that the
people credited are the people I pull the changes from, which is not
necessarily at all the people who actually wrote the code.
Just to give people a sense of the disparity between the maintainer
list below and the number of people submitting patches, there are
about 1400 authors in total for the stuff that came in during the
merge window.
Anyway, enough blathering. Go out and test. And in particular, if
you're a low-level filesystem person, or involved in other ways in
path component lookup (security layer etc), go check that everything
looks ok, and if your filesystem isn't one that does parallel lookups
or readdirs yet (because locking issues), take a look at that too.
Linus
