Another week, another rc, and things look fairly normal: the diffstat
looks fairly flat (implying small changes) and we don't have any
unusual amount of activity.
The one thing that does show up in the diffstat is the softscroll
removal (both fbcon and vgacon), and there are people who want to save
that, but we'll see if some maintainer steps up. I'm not willing to
resurrect it in the broken form it was in, so I doubt that will happen
in 5.9, but we'll see what happens.
The other stats also look normal: about 60% of the patch is drivers
(and yes, the softscroll is a noticeable part, but not overwhelmingly
so - there's sound, gpu, mtd, i2c, usb etc). And the usual arch
updates, along with some vm fixes (including the fix for the
performance regression noted last rc) and perf tooling updates.
We also have a (test regression (not the performance one) in the VM
that we know about - the test that triggers this was admittedly buggy,
but if the test was buggy it is quite possible that real uses are
buggy too. We don't actually have any known case of any such real user
breakage, but we do have a nice fix for the test regression that is
very much the RightThing(tm) to do in the long run, so that has been
actively discussed.
We know what the fix looks like, and a few initial patches have been
floating around, but a final patch doesn't exist yet, and depending on
how that goes this might be something that pushes out the final 5.9 by
a week. We'll see.
So there's still some development going on, but honestly, that VM case
is a very odd corner case that normal users should never hit, so it
should not keep anybody from testing this in the meantime.
Holler if you see anything odd,
Linus
