This release cycle remains pretty normal. In fact, the rc's have been
a bit on the smaller side of the average of the last few releases, and
rc4 continues this, if only barely.
The stats all look fairly normal too. About half is drivers, with
networking being the bulk of it, but there's stuff all over the place:
drm, input, block, md, gpio, irqchip...
The networking backlog shows up outside of drivers too, with core
networking changes being about a third of the non-driver part of the
patches. But there's the usual arch updates (arm64, x86, xtensa), and
a noticeable chunk of mm fixes from Andrew. And the rest is
miscellaneous all over - Documentation, core kernel, filesystems, gdb
scripting, tools.
But none of it is really all that big or looks all that scary or unusual.
Shortlog appended so that you can scroll through it and get a feeling
for the details.
I'm traveling this week before Open Source Summit Europe, but if
things stay this calm it shouldn't even be noticeable.
Linus