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Linux 5.9 rc6

Written By
LT
Linus Torvalds
Sep 20, 2020
Another week, another rc, and things look fairly normal: the diffstatlooks fairly flat (implying small changes) and we don't have anyunusual amount of activity.The one thing that does show up in the diffstat is the softscrollremoval (both fbcon and vgacon), and there are people who want to savethat, but we'll see if some maintainer steps up. I'm not willing toresurrect it in the broken form it was in, so I doubt that will happenin 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 overwhelminglyso - there's sound, gpu, mtd, i2c, usb etc). And the usual archupdates, along with some vm fixes (including the fix for theperformance regression noted last rc) and perf tooling updates.We also have a (test regression (not the performance one) in the VMthat we know about - the test that triggers this was admittedly buggy,but if the test was buggy it is quite possible that real uses arebuggy too. We don't actually have any known case of any such real userbreakage, but we do have a nice fix for the test regression that isvery  much the RightThing(tm) to do in the long run, so that has beenactively discussed.We know what the fix looks like, and a few initial patches have beenfloating around, but a final patch doesn't exist yet, and depending onhow that goes this might be something that pushes out the final 5.9 bya week. We'll see.So there's still some development going on, but honestly, that VM caseis a very odd corner case that normal users should never hit, so itshould not keep anybody from testing this in the meantime.Holler if you see anything odd,                  Linus
LT

Linus Torvalds

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