Another week, another rc.
Normally rc7 is the last in the series before the final release, but
by now I'm pretty sure that this is going to be one of those releases
that come with an rc8. Things did't calm down as much as I would have
liked, there are still a few discussions going on, and it's just
unlikely that I will feel like it's all good and ready for a final 4.8
next Sunday.
That said, there's nothing *huge* going on, there was just more noise
than I'd like. Part of rc7 is obviously the networking fixes that
missed rc6 by mere minutes, but there are various other driver updates
too (rdma, nvme and even a few pcmcia fixes - yeah, it's not quite
dead yet). And a fair number of small architecture fixes (Al's uaccess
fixes stand out, but there's some perf and KVM fixes and other random
things going on too).
The shortlog may not be quite as short as I'd like, but it's appended
and it's not exactly huge either - you can easily scroll through it
and get a rough feel for the details).
Another thing that makes me say "might as well do an rc8" is that it
doesn't look like linux-next is all that big, so I don't get the
feeling that there is any particular pressure to open the merge
window. There's a few features that look to be scheduled for merging
up for 4.9 that I'm looking forward to, but another week won't hurt.
Of course, maybe things go *so* swimmingly the upcoming week that I
decide that 4.8 is ready, and there really isn't anything in
particular that worries me, but seeing fixes for fixes happening the
last week just makes me go "Ehh, thing are still in flux".
But please go out and test,
Linus
