So this goes out on Monday morning rather than my usual Sunday
afternoon schedule, simply because I was away from a keyboard most of
Sunday. It happens.
Partly because of that, I got a couple of pull requests (networking,
usb, misc/char) that would have missed this rc with the normal timing,
and it's a bit bigger as a result. Not huge, but considering how quiet
the beginning of the week was, it's definitely noticeable, and the one
extra day added about 25% to the size of the rc.
That's not enough for me to go "uhhuh, uncomfortably much this late in
the rc game" but I also happened to look at the calendar last week,
and it dawned on me that I have the kernel summit travel coming up,
and if I do the usual release cadence, I'd be on the road during the
worst time (for me) of the merge window - the first five days.
So I do suspect that with my timing (and a number of other developers
are probably going to be traveling for LPC and KS too) I'll just make
an rc8 even if it turns this Labor Day week ends up being very quiet
and there might not be any _technical_ reason to delay the release.
NOTE! If you are a submaintainer, and have your pull request all ready
to go for 5.4, you should - as always - feel free to just send it
early. I already have one 5.4 pull request in my inbox, and I much
prefer the early ones over the late ones. So if you were planning for
the normal cadence, just go on with your life, and ignore the likely
one-week release delay due to conference travel.
As to what happened in rc7 itself: the shortlog is appended, and
nothing huge stands out. The diffstat is mostly fairly flat, which
means it's a lot of small changes, with just a few blips: rxpc,
openvswitch, cifssmb cleanups, turbostat utility update, and some
embargoed hw issue process documentation.
But the bulk of it is small fixes all over: drivers, networking, arch
updates, documentation, filesystems..
Would I have been happier with things being even calmer? Sure. But it
all looks pretty normal.
So go forth and test,
Linus
