Jon Masters summarises the happenings in the Linux kernel community around the release of the 3.11-rc1 kernel
Linus torvalds announced the release of the 3.11-rc1 kernel, noting that it had been two weeks and “the merge window [period of time early in a release cycle during which disruptive kernel changes are permitted] has closed”.
According to Linus, “[this] merge window was smaller in terms of number of commits than the 3.10 merge window, but we actually have more new lines [of code]. Most of that seems to be in staging [a part of the kernel for new driver code] – a full third of all changes by line-count is staging, and merging in Lustre is the bulk of that”. This was followed by an RC2 that added “unnamed temporary files” (O_TMPFILE) – we’ll write about this in a later issue – and (a late change) new handling for backlights on systems designed to run Windows 8. Those systems are intended not to use direct ACPI method calls to control the backlight but instead directly drive the backlight control in the graphics driver.