I'm not entirely sure we need an rc8, because last week was pretty calm despite the Intel hw workarounds landing. So I considered just making a final 5.4 and be done with it, but decided that there's no real downside to just doing the rc8 after having a release cycle that took a while to calm down.
But it *has* calmed down, and I expect the upcoming week to be quiet too (knock wood).
In fact, considering that the week after that is Thanksgiving week in the US, I'm hoping that most of the pull requests I get next week aren't fixes for 5.4, but people sending me early pull requests for when the merge window for 5.5 opens. That way those proactive developers can then sit back and relax during that turkey-filled feast...
Anyway, looking at the rc8 diffs, the bulk of it is for the intel hw issues, both on the CPU side (TSX Async Abort, and the iTLB multihit thing), and on the GPU side (GPU hang and invalid accesses). None of the patches are big, and honestly, shouldn't affect anybody.
The other noticeable thing in the diffs is the removal of the vboxsf filesystem. It will get resubmitted properly later, there was nothing obviously wrong with it technically, it just ended up in the wrong location and submitted at the wrong time. We'll get it done properly probably during 5.5.
Outside of those two areas, there's some kvm fixes, and some minor core networking, VM and VFS fixes. And various random small things.
Nothing really looks all that worrisome from a release standpoint, and as mentioned I was toying with just skipping this rc entirely. But better safe than sorry.
Please do go give the tires a final few kicks before the expected 5.4 release next weekend.
