Linux 5.2 rc6 | Linux Today

Linux 5.2 rc6

Written By
SMK
Sean Michael Kerner
Jun 23, 2019
Uhh-uh.I really was hoping that we'd continue to have an increasingly quietand shrinking rc series. But that was not to be.rc6 is the biggest rc in number of commits we've had so far for this5.2 cycle (obviously ignoring the merge window itself and rc1). Andit's not just because of trivial patches (although admittedly we havethose too), but we obviously had the TCP SACK/fragmentation/mss fixesin there, and they in turn required some fixes too.Happily we did pick up on the problem quickly - largely thanks to thepatches making it into distro kernels quickly and then causingproblems for the steam client of all things - but it's still somethingthat doesn't exactly make me get the warm and fuzzies at this point inthe release cycle.I'm also doing this rc on a Saturday, because I am going to spend allof tomorrow on a plane once again. So I'm traveling first for aconference and then for some R&R on a liveaboard, so I'm going to havespotty access to email for a few days, and then for a week I'll beentirely incommunicado. So rc7 will be delayed.I was thinking that I timed it all really well in what should be thequietest period of the release cycle for me, and now I obviously hopethat last week really was a fluke.Anyway, if something happens when I'm offline, Greg can presumablystep up, although he'll have the same conference travel (butpresumably at least the reverse jetlag 😉With all that out of the way, I'm still reasonably optimistic thatwe're on track for a calm final part of the release, and I don't thinkthere is anything particularly bad on the horizon.And while we did have some excitement this week, _most_ of it by farwas the usual small fixes. Including the by now expected SPDX updates,so the diffstat looks a bit messy again.Anyway, ignoring the SPDX updates (and you should, even if theydominate the diffstat), about a quarter of the rc6 update isnetworking (the TCP fixes being a fairly small part of it - the bulkis still network driver and other networking fixes, including bpf).Another quarter is selftests (mostly bpf) and documentation.The rest other driver updates (gpu, rdma, thunderbolt, usb..) archupdates (x86, risc-v and arm[64]), and misc other updates (overlayfsetc).But honestly, most of it really is pretty small (again - ignoring theSPDX noise), so despite my misgivings I don't think we're really introuble.Shortlog appended for the brave souls who want to look at details,                 Linus
SMK

Sean Michael Kerner

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