Two weeks have passed, Christmas is over, and so is the merge window.
I want to thank all the maintainers who sent in their pull requests early: we all wanted to get things done before the holidays really hit, and mostly it seemed to work quite well.
In fact, it was rather nice to handle the big bulk of all the merge window pull requests in the first three or four days of the merge window. I wouldn't want to do it that way every time - it would stress me out - but as an occasional "let's get it over with so that the second week is calm" it really wasn't bad at all.
It probably helped that 5.11 isn't going to be an LTS release and isn't as big as 5.10 was, but it's not small either. Solidly average.
Well, it's average, unless you look at the actual diffs, and notice another huge dump of AMD GPU descriptor header files, which completely dwarfs all the "real" changes here. The AMD "Van Gogh" include file additions are in fact about two thirds of the whole patch, even if it comes from basically one single commit that just adds the register definitions. We've had it before, I'm sure we'll see it in the future too: header files probably generated from the hardware description for all the possible bit masks etc get very very big.
Oh well. If you ignore that area, everything else looks normal. Driver updates dominate, but all the usual other suspects are there: arch updates, filesystems, networking, docs and tooling.
And while it doesn't look like a huge release, it's certainly still big enough that what's appended below is just my "merge log". As always, my merge logs credit only the people I pull from, which is a much smaller set than all the people involved in actually writing the patches. As usual we had more than 1500 actual developers, and roughly 12,500 changes merged. That's pretty much our average these days.
