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Linux Kernel Changelog

What's new in Linux Kernel 4.7 RC6

Jul 4, 2016
  • It's not like this is a huge rc, but it's definitely bigger than the previous rc's were. I don't think that's necessarily a big problem, it seems to be mostly timing - we've just happened to get merges from most subsystems (eg networking from Davem, and all of the usual device driver subsystems from Greg, not to mention the GPU updates and all the random other subsystem maintainers). But networking (both drivers and core) is the most noticeable part.

New in Linux Kernel 4.6 RC5 (Apr 25, 2016)

  • the bulk of the changes are to drivers as usual (at about 60% - Ethernet drivers stand out in the diffstat, but it's pretty spread out), with networking and tooling being most of the rest. There's a smattering of other small changes.

New in Linux Kernel 4.6 RC2 (Apr 3, 2016)

  • The patch statistics look fairly normal too: about half is drivers, almost a quarter is architecture fixups, and the rest is mostly networking and some documentation updates, but there's some core kernel/mm/fs fixes in there too.

New in Linux Kernel 4.5 RC6 (Feb 28, 2016)

  • The diffstat looks odd this time because there's a big patch to one of the network driver header files that makes it look like the include directory is almost 40% of the whole change. But that patch just renames a ton of reserved fields, no actual code change.
  • Ignoring that oddity in the diffstat statistics, things look fairly normal. Mostly drivers (networking and usb dominate, but there's some gpu, sound, acpi fixes too), with the usual architecture updates (arc, arm, x86) and some core networking. Some perf work, and a few filesystem fixes (nfs, dax, some core vfs).

New in Linux Kernel 4.5 RC3 (Feb 8, 2016)

  • Most of the patches are pretty small, although the diff is utterly dominated by the (big) removal a couple of staging rdma drivers that just weren't going anywhere. Those removal patches are 90% of the bulk of the diff.
  • Of the remaining 10%, the rest is still mostly drivers (networking, gpu, sound, usb), with the rest being miscellaneous other stuff (core networking, some VM fixes from Andrew, ARM SoC fixes, crypto etc).

New in Linux Kernel 4.5 RC2 (Feb 1, 2016)

  • Drivers and architecture updates are only about half of the patch, with perf fixes and some of the new virtio self-tests being much of the rest. There's some btrfs fixes too.

New in Linux Kernel 4.5 RC1 (Jan 25, 2016)

  • The statistics look fairly normal too, with drivers being a bit over 70% of the bulk (the big driver areas being gpu, networking, sound, staging, fbdev, but its all over). The shortlog is too big and unwieldly to post, but I'm appending my "mergelog" which credits the maintainers I merge from - not necessarily the people who did the actual individual patches.
  • Aside from drivers, we have architecture updates (over half of it being arm - both 32- and 64-bit this time around, the rest is powerpc, x86, mips, s390). On the arch front, it's probably worth mentioning that apparently the arm people have finalized their platform work, and that you really can build a generic ARM kernel for all the ARMv6/7 platforms (and describe the hardware with devicetree). It's been many years in coming. Good job.
  • There's also obviously the usual documentation, filesystem, generic networking, and core kernel updates. A number of nice MM cleanuips came in through Andrew this time around, for example, and Al Viro made pathname lookup stay in RCU mode even over symlink traveral.

New in Linux Kernel 4.4 RC8 (Jan 4, 2016)

  • It's about half drivers (mostly network drivers, but some rdma stuff and a smattering of small other changes), with the rest being arch updates (mainly sparc, arm), some general networking code, and some crypto fixes.

New in Linux Kernel 4.4 RC7 (Dec 28, 2015)

  • A third of the patch is from the sparc updates, and those weren't that big either. The rest is other architectures (x86, parisc, mips, arm, arc), drivers (gpu, sound, mtd..) and some build updates.

New in Linux Kernel 4.4 RC6 (Dec 21, 2015)

  • Over 60% drivers, 16% core networking, 13% architecture updates, and 10% "misc" (documentation, header files, some small filesystem updates etc).

New in Linux Kernel 4.4 RC5 (Dec 14, 2015)

  • Things have been reasonable quiet, and rc5 looks pretty normal. There was a fairly bad core bug that was introduced in rc4 that is now fixed in rc5, but while that is a bit embarrassing, I don't think that many people actually ever hit the problem. Other than that small hiccup, things are very normal,.and there really are not very many commits, and they are all pretty small to boot.

New in Linux Kernel 4.4 RC4 (Dec 7, 2015)

  • Everything looks fairly normal: about 70% drivers - network drivers, gpu, sound, scsi dominate. On top of that we have 15% core networking, and the rest is split between arch updates and "misc" stuff all over (including some vfs and core kernel fixes).

New in Linux Kernel 4.4 RC3 (Nov 30, 2015)

  • just under 60% driver updates (of which almost half is GPU updates, this time mainly skewed due to some nouveau firmware update patches), about 25% arch updates (mostly arm[64], but some changes in x86, s390, powerpc, nios, mips, m68k, arc..), and about 10% filesystem updates (mostly btrfs and nfs). With the rest being "misc" (mainly header files).

New in Linux Kernel 4.3 (Nov 2, 2015)

  • The changes from rc7 are dominated by the network stuff, but as you can tell from the appended shortlog it's not anything particularly scary. So on the whole, this remains a rather calm release cycle until the very end. And with the release of 4.3, obviously the merge window for 4.4 is open, and let's keep our fingers crossed that that will be an equally calm release. Especially since apparently Greg has decided ahead of time (as an experiment brought on by discussion at the kernel summit) that 4.4 will be another LTS release.

New in Linux Kernel 4.3 RC7 (Oct 25, 2015)

  • There's also a few other slightly larger pulls (ARM SoC fixes, along with gpu, block layer and media fixes), and obviously all the usual misc driver fixes etc. But the networking changes is what makes it look a bit different from the previous rc.

New in Linux Kernel 4.3 RC6 (Oct 19, 2015)

  • Almost all of it is drivers, with infiniband and gpu patches being most noticeable. But even there, the biggest patch by far is just a copyright message clarification in infiniband, which by itself is almost a third of the whole patch. Because the rest is really pretty small.
  • Aside from the driver fixes, there's a few smallish arch updates (the bulk of which are a few x86 kvm fixes for SMM emulation, but even those are by no means large). And a couple of mm oneliners.

New in Linux Kernel 4.3 RC5 (Oct 11, 2015)

  • The 4.3 release cycle continues to be fairly smooth - knock wood. There's nothing particularly worrying here: we had some annoying fallout from the new strscpy stuff (it's not actually *used* anywhere yet, but we had build failures on some architectures), and a vfs layer change uncovered an ancient and fascinating ext[34] bug, but on the whole things look pretty normal. It's the usual "lots of small fixes to drivers and architecture code, with some filesystem updates thrown in for variety". The appended shortlog gives an overview of the details.
  • Things also seem to be calming down nicely, although since there was no network pull this week, we might have a bump from that next rc.

New in Linux Kernel 4.3 RC4 (Oct 4, 2015)

  • We have noticeably fewer commits than rc3
  • (which was fairly big), and I don't see anything unusually alarming.
  • The statistics look pretty normal too: just under half of the patch is
  • drivers (drm continues to be noticeable, but there's infiniband, mmc,
  • input layer etc). About a quarter is arch updates (m68k, MIPS, x86)
  • and the final quarter is solidly "misc" (doc updates, tools, scripts,
  • scheduler, mm..).

New in Linux Kernel 4.3 RC2 (Sep 20, 2015)

  • We're on the usual Sunday schedule, and -rc2 is out there. As has been the trend for a while now, rc2 tends to be reasonably small, probably because it takes a while for regression reports to start trickling in (and some people probably actively wait for rc2 to even start testing - you scaredy-cats, you).
  • Anyway, things are looking fairly normal. There's some noise all over the tree due to the irq flow-handler cleanup that removed the redundant irq number argument. But apart from that one-time thing, things are looking fairly calm and small - let's see whether that continues. Knock wood.
  • Anyway, it's the usual mix of architecture and driver fixes, with a smattering of other stuff (the perf tooling updates stand out, for example). I don't think there's anything particularly alarming, the appended shortlog gives the fairly boring details.

New in Linux Kernel 4.3 RC1 (Sep 13, 2015)

  • Everything looks fairly normal, in fact, with about 70% of the changes being drivers, 10% architecture updates, and the remaining 20% are spread out (filesystems, networking, tooling, documentation, mm and "core" kernel updates etc).
  • On the driver side, the GPU drivers remain a noticeable chunk, partly because of the Nouveau updates that missed 4.2, so there's effectively two releases worth of updates there. But there's driver updates to pretty much all the other driver subsystems too. So there's networking drivers (wired and wireless), staging, media, crypto, pinctrl, you name it.
  • The architecture updates are about half arm (devicetree updates are noticeable), with half being spread out (x86, mips, arm64, powerpc, s390).
  • On the filesystem side, the bulk of the changes (in lines of code) is the removal of the ext3 filesystem (with ext4 remaining to support ext3 layouts - but the separate ext3 codebase is gone). But there are misc updates all over: f2fs, btrfs, nfs, xfs, ufs, gfs2, proc...

New in Linux Kernel 4.2 RC7 (Aug 17, 2015)

  • 70% drivers (networking, ntb, xen, md, gpu), with the rest being mostly some architecture updates and some non-driver networking updates.

New in Linux Kernel 4.2 RC6 (Aug 9, 2015)

  • Apart from that ARC oddity, things look normal. Mostly drivers (gpu,
  • sound, i2c, input, usb, thermal, you name it) and other architecture
  • updates (mips and sparc). With some filesystem and VM fixes rounding
  • up the changes.

New in Linux Kernel 4.2 RC5 (Aug 3, 2015)

  • Not a lot of arch noise this time(apart from the aforementioned NMI fallout on x86) - so just over three quarters of the changes are drivers, with drm, infiniband, networking and scsi leading the charge. The rest is mostly filesystem and networking code.

New in Linux Kernel 4.2 RC4 (Jul 26, 2015)

  • So we still had some bugs due to the low-level x86 asm cleanup work, and the 32-bit compat 'syscall' instruction (only used on AMD) was subtly broken. That should be all fixed now, so if you run a 64-bit kernel and have 32-bit user space (including things like wine etc) and saw problems earlier, go ahead and update. Of course, please go ahead and update even if you didn't see problems, just to test the new rc.
  • Other than that issue, it's mostly drivers and networking. USB, gpu, mmc, network drivers, sound. With some ARM noise (but even that is mostly driver-related: dts updates due to MMC fixes). And a few small filesystem fixes.

New in Linux Kernel 4.2 RC3 (Jul 19, 2015)

  • About 50% drivers, with the rest being half "architecture updates (x86, arm, m68k, s390, arc) and the rest spread out all over. Networking, tools, filesystems, etc.

New in Linux Kernel 4.2 RC2 (Jul 13, 2015)

  • The rc2 patch is roughly one third drivers (drm being the bulk of it), one third architectures (arm, mips and parisc, a smattering of x86) and one third "misc". That misc pile is mostly filesystems (btrfs) and some timer updates, and then the perf tool build fix that involved just making some of the perf tool infrastructure private to the tool rather than trying to share it with the kernel.

New in Linux Kernel 4.1 (Jun 22, 2015)

  • Anyway, since rc8 we've had truly small changes, mainly some final driver fixups (HDA sound, drm, scsi target, crypto) and a couple of small misc fixes. The appended shortlog is probably one of the shortest ones ever.

New in Linux Kernel 4.1 RC8 (Jun 15, 2015)

  • But the bulk is (as usual) drivers, and no, that's not from the md camp (those fixes are very small). Mostly ethernet, slave-dma, and spund. But some drm fixes and random other noise too. There's some generic networking fixes as well, and random small stuff.

New in Linux Kernel 4.1 RC7 (Jun 8, 2015)

  • A lot of it is one-liners, with a few slightly bigger patches to some architecture files (x86 perf constraints, some sparc updates) and staging drivers.

New in Linux Kernel 4.1 RC6 (Jun 1, 2015)

  • This is about half drivers (mainly scsi target, networking, and graphics, plus the aforementioned raid and dm changes, with other random fixes). The rest is fairly evenly split between architecture updates (alpha stands out), filesystem updates (xfs, cifs and overlayfs) and "misc" (networking, turbostat tool update, documentation).

New in Linux Kernel 4.1 RC5 (May 25, 2015)

  • We've got about two thirds driver updates (gpu, infiniband, sound, networking, scsi, thermal), and almost half of the remainder is networking updates. The rest is mostly arch updates and some filesystem fixes.

New in Linux Kernel 4.1 RC4 (May 18, 2015)

  • So here it is, last-minute fix and all. The -rc4 patch is a bit bigger than the previous ones, but that seems to be mainly due to normal random timing - just the fluctuation of when submaintainer trees get pushed, and rc4 has fixes from Greg to various driver trees _and_ the networking fixes from Davem, so the slightly larger size isn't indicative of any sudden problems.
  • But while drivers and networking dominate the changes, there's a random smattering of other changes. Filesystems (btrfs, nfsd) and architecture updates (mainly arm, arm64 and mips) and some other misc changes.

New in Linux Kernel 4.1 RC3 (May 10, 2015)

  • As you can tell, it's mostly drivers, with a smattering of arch updates (mostly ARM). And a smattering of misc stuff: perf tooling, documentation, filesystems. The infiniband update is a noticeable chunk of the drivers, we had some delayed stuff there due to maintainership changes.
  • Nothing particularly scary or worrisome going on, although there are little fixes all over. Some of them are regressions from this merge window, and some of them are older. And some of them are so old that I almost thought "if it's been broken since 2011, and you only noticed now, maybe it could have waited for the next merge window". You know who you are (and others will too, if they read the commit messages - your shame is out there).

New in Linux Kernel 4.1 RC2 (May 4, 2015)

  • As usual, it's a mixture of driver fixes, arch updates (with s390 really standing out due to that one prng commit), and some filesystem and networking. The attached shortlog gives the details, there's nothing particularly worrisome here. So far 4.1 looks fairly normal.

New in Linux Kernel 4.1 RC1 (Apr 27, 2015)

  • The bulk of the changes are to drivers (just under 60% of the patch), with arch updates being about 20% of it all, and the rest is spread all over.

New in Linux Kernel 4.0 RC7 (Apr 6, 2015)

  • It's about three quarters driver updates (the bulk of it being network drivers, but there's stuff all over: gpu, iio, input, usb...). The rest is some small x86 fixes, some networking, a lazytime fix and documentation.

New in Linux Kernel 4.0 RC6 (Mar 29, 2015)

  • Things are calming down nicelly, and there are fixes all over. The NUMA balancing performance regression is fixed, and things are looking up again in general. There were a number of i915 issues and a KVM double-fault thing that meant that for a while there I was pretty sure that this would be a release that will go to rc8, but that may be
  • unnecessary. Apart from the aforementioned issues, the bulk of this is mostly small misc driver fixes and architecture updates. The shortlog gives more of a flavor of what's been going on.

New in Linux Kernel 4.0 RC4 (Mar 16, 2015)

  • Nothing particularly strange going on this week either, with perhaps just a slightly larger-than-expected ARM SoC update. So "just" half of the patch is driver updates, with about half of the rest being ARM changes.
  • The rest is the usual random mix of fixes - some other architectures (s390, nios2), some networking, core kernel and vm, some documentation updates. Nothing particularly stands out here. Shortlog appended, I think we're doing fine for where in the release cycle we are.

New in Linux Kernel 4.0 RC3 (Mar 9, 2015)

  • Size-wise, this is also fairly normal, not as tiny as rc2. Easily explained by getting the fixes from both David and Greg (since networking and drivers tend to be the two single biggest parts).
  • And the patch distribution is quite standard too: about two thirds drivers (gpu, networking, usb, staging, sound, misc), with the rest being filesystems (mainly nfs, btrfs), architecture updates (arc, x86, arm, powerpc), networking, and Documentation.

New in Linux Kernel 4.0 RC2 (Mar 4, 2015)

  • It's been a very quiet week, for being this early in the release process. Sure, 3.19-rc2 was even smaller, so it continues a trend, but that was the xmas week. I hope this low volume is just because the 4.0 merge window itself was somewhat calmer than most recent releases. But I suspect the real reason is that the driver and networking trees from GregKH and davem are pending, and didn't make rc2.

New in Linux Kernel 4.0 RC1 (Feb 23, 2015)

  • The live patching infrastructure made some news, but my personal favorite features are actually some vm cleanups, where this release is getting rid of the largely unused non-linear remapping code (replaced with just emulating it with lots of smaller mappings) and unifies the NUMA and PROTNONE handling for page tables.

New in Linux Kernel 3.19 RC7 (Feb 2, 2015)

  • Fairly normal rc statistics - about 50% drivers, 20% arch updates (mostly arm and arm64, some x86), with filesystems showing up a bit more than usual (largely due to some quota changes), and the rest being "misc" - perf tooling, some minor kernel and vm changes etc.

New in Linux Kernel 3.19 RC6 (Jan 26, 2015)

  • The statistics look very normal, with the patch being about 70% driver changes (a Dell laptop platform driver revert being the biggest single patch, but there's networking, media, gpu, gpio, sound..) and about 14% arch updates (x86 and arm are the biggest ones, but there are small updates to others too) and the rest is mostly scattered all over
  • (documentation updates, some networking, some filesystem changes - mainly btrfs, etc etc).

New in Linux Kernel 3.19 RC5 (Jan 18, 2015)

  • The arm64 vm bug that I mentioned as pending in the rc4 notes got fixed within a day of that previous rc release, and the rest looks pretty standard. Mostly drivers (networking, usb, scsi target, block layer, mmc, tty etc), but also arch updates (arm, x86, s390 and some tiny powerpc fixes), some filesystem updates (fuse and nfs), tracing fixes, and some perf tooling fixes.

New in Linux Kernel 3.19 RC4 (Jan 11, 2015)

  • Apart from the kgdb patches showing up as some uncommon work under kernel/debug/, things look fairly normal: mostly driver updates (gpu, pinctrl, hid, networking), architecture updates (mainly x86 this time, some minor arm[64] stuff), and some tooling fixes (mainly perf).

New in Linux Kernel 3.19 RC3 (Jan 6, 2015)

  • A bit over three quarters of the changes here are drivers - mostly networking, thermal, input layer, sound, power management. The rest is misc - filesystems, core networking, some arch fixes, etc. But all of it is pretty small.

New in Linux Kernel 3.19 RC1 (Dec 21, 2014)

  • In the "big picture", this looks like a fairly normal release. About two thirds driver updates, with about half of the rest being architecture updates (and no, the new nios2 patches are not at all dominant, it's about half ARM, with the new nios2 support being less than 10% of the arch updates by lines overall). The remaining one sixth is "misc": networking, header updates, documentation, filesystems, tooling, and core kernel (in pretty much that order).

New in Linux Kernel 3.18 (Dec 8, 2014)

  • It's been a quiet week, and the patch from rc7 is tiny, so 3.18 is out.
  • I'd love to say that we've figured out the problem that plagues 3.17 for a couple of people, but we haven't. At the same time, there's absolutely no point in having everybody else twiddling their thumbs when a couple of people are actively trying to bisect an older issue, so holding up the release just didn't make sense. Especially since
  • that would just have then held things up entirely over the holiday break.
  • So the merge window for 3.19 is open, and DaveJ will hopefully get his bisection done (or at least narrow things down sufficiently that we have that "Ahaa" moment) over the next week. But in solidarity with Dave (and to make my life easier too ;) let's try to avoid introducing any _new_ nasty issues, ok?

New in Linux Kernel 3.18 RC7 (Dec 1, 2014)

  • The rc7 patch looks very normal, with two thirds being drivers (spread all over: usb, networking, staging, thermal, gpu, sound..) and half of the remaining being arch updates (mostly mips, arm, powerpc). The remaining is mainly networking and some filesystem fixes (nfsd and btrfs).

New in Linux Kernel 3.18 RC6 (Nov 24, 2014)

  • The good news is that things are generally calming down, and most of the changes are smallish regression fixes here, with a smattering of stable patches. About half drivers (networking, sound, pci, infiniband, etc), with architecture updates (x86, mips, arm), and networking code being about half of the rest. And the last quarter is "misc": filesystem fixes, documentation, scheduler.

New in Linux Kernel 3.18 RC5 (Nov 17, 2014)

  • About 55% drivers (networking, gpu, cypto, thermal, sound), 15% arch updates (xtensa, x86, arm[64], parsic, sparc), and the rest is a mostly a mix of netwoorking, filesystem, VM, documentation and tracing updates.

New in Linux Kernel 3.18 RC3 (Nov 3, 2014)

  • Lots and lots of small stuff, with drivers accounting for the bulk of it (both in commits and in lines), but networking and core kernel showing up too. Nothing particularly stands out.

New in Linux Kernel 3.18 RC2 (Oct 27, 2014)

  • nd to be honest, we've had bigger rc2's in history. Not recently, though. Both 3.3 and 3.4 had big -rc2 releases, and 3.15 (which was the largest release ever, iirc) came reasonably close.
  • At least _part_ of the size is the very long-delayed overlayfs merge that I already mentioned in the rc1 release message as being pending. Let's see how much fallout that all causes, but it's been around for a long time (partly because it needed various vfs-layer things to integrate cleanly), and I think it's in good shape. Knock wood.
  • So at least partially as a result of that overlayfs merge, about a third of the patch is filesystems. It's not _just_ overlayfs, though, there was a late ext4 merge request that I think is actually bigger, at least partly due to some extent handling refactoring.
  • The rest is the more usual driver updates (thermal, watchdog, scsi target, ACPI & PM, misc other updates) and architecture updates (arc, arm, powerpc, mips, x86). Some documentation and include file updates rounds out the rest.

New in Linux Kernel 3.17 RC7 (Sep 29, 2014)

  • There's stuff all over here. The i2c part of the patches stands out a bit because of some code movement, but apart from that the diffstat looks pretty calm. About 60% drivers, with the rest being a mix of documentation, arch, filesystem and networking. Nothing
  • really particularly stands out, but it is just bigger than I was happy with doing a release without another rc.

New in Linux Kernel 3.17 RC6 (Sep 22, 2014)

  • A bit more than half is drivers (gpu, sound, iio, media, usb), just under a third is arch updates (arm, mips, x86), and the rest is mainly filesystem updates (gfs2, cifs, btrfs, nfs).

New in Linux Kernel 3.17 RC5 (Sep 15, 2014)

  • The rc5 changes is about half drivers (networking, gpu, usb, input, ata..) with the rest being mostly a mix of filesystem updates (the aforementioned performance thing in the core vfs layer, but also some NFS export issues found by Al and misc other stuff), architecture updates (arm, parisc, s390) and core networking. And a smattering of other. Shortlog appended.

New in Linux Kernel 3.17 RC4 (Sep 8, 2014)

  • For a short while there, this week was really nice and calm, but that was mostly because the "linux-foundation.org" entry fell off the DNS universe, and my mailbox got very quiet for a few hours. The rest of the week looked pretty normal.
  • "Pretty normal" isn't bad, though, and I'm not complaining. There is nothing particularly big or scary going on - we had a quick scare about a stupid compat layer bug, but it seems to have been just a false positive and resulted in some added commentary rather than any
  • real code changes.
  • The diffstat is pretty reasonable, and it's fairly spread out. We have the usual arch and driver updates, but there's actually more changes under fs/ than under either of those. That's largely due to just a late f2fs update, which I decided I couldn't be bothered to get too upset about, most of it being pretty clear-cut fixes, with just a few cleanups mixed in.
  • And really, if the f2fs changes look biggish, it's mostly because the rest is pretty small.
  • Let's hope it all stays calm. I do note that neither Greg nor Davem ended up sending me anything for rc4, which is probably the _real_ reason why it's pretty calm and small.

New in Linux Kernel 3.17 RC3 (Sep 1, 2014)

  • I'm back to the usual Sunday release schedule, and -rc3 is out there now. As expected, it is larger than rc2, since people are clearly getting back from their Kernel Summit travels etc. But happily, it's not *much* larger than rc2 was, and there's nothing particularly odd
  • going on, so I'm going to just ignore the whole "it's summer" argument, and hope that things are just going that well.

New in Linux Kernel 3.17 RC2 (Aug 26, 2014)

  • So I deviated from my normal Sunday schedule partly because there wasn't much there (I blame the KS and LinuxCon), but partly due to sentimental reasons: Aug 25 is the anniversary of the original Linux announcement ("Hello everybody out there using minix"), so it's just a good day for release announcements.
  • Anyway, for being an rc2 it's pretty small, and I can always hope that things stay that way. It's about 60% drivers (drm, networking, hid, sound, PCI), with 15% filesystem updates (cifs, isofs, nfs), 10% architectures (mips, arm, some minor x86 stuff) and the rest is "misc" (kernel, networking, documentation).

New in Linux Kernel 3.17 RC1 (Aug 16, 2014)

  • I'm going to be on a plane much of tomorrow, and am not really supportive of last-minute pull requests during the merge window anyway, so I'm closing the merge window one day early, and 3.17-rc1 is out there now. Well, it's been out for a while now, but the network was bad enough where I'm traveling that I couldn't get this *announcement* out.
  • Anyway, this merge window was slightly smaller than the last few ones, probably due to summer slowdowns in the northern hemisphere. Which is not to say that it was *small* - the last few releases have been larger than usual, this one is just fairly average. It's certainly big enough that I can't post the shortlog, so as usual this just appends
  • the "mergelog" where the people credited are the people I pulled from, not necessarily the people who wrote the code.
  • Changes all over the place, but no huge new architectures or filesystems. About three quarters of the changes are drivers, and of the rest, roughly half is architecture updates, with the rest being misc core changes (networking, filesystems etc).
  • The upcoming week is the kernel summit, so I'm guessing rc2 will be fairly small, but we'll see how that goes.

New in Linux Kernel 3.16 RC6 (Jul 21, 2014)

  • Week by week, we're getting to what is supposed to be the last rc's, but quite frankly, things aren't calming down the way they are supposed to.
  • That was already true for rc5 - it was bigger than rc4. That didn't worry me all that much, because rc4 was really pretty small. But now rc6 is out, and it's bigger than rc5 was, and it's not even all trivial stuff. That's not how this is all supposed to work.
  • Anyway, rc6 still isn't all *that* big, so I'm not exactly worried, but I am getting to the point where I'm going to start calling people names and shouting at you if you send me stuff that isn't appropriate for the late rc releases. Which is not to say that people did: while rc6 is bigger than I wished for, I don't think there's too much obviously frivolous in there. But I'll be keepign an eye out, and I'll be starting to get grumpy (or grumpiER) if I notice that peopel aren't being serious about trying to calm things down.
  • Regardless, rc6 itself ends up having changes pretty much all over: drivers (much of it networking, but there's gpu, there's infiniband, you name it), filesystems (late nfs fixes, xfs, fuse, gfs2, btrfs), core networking code, etc etc. The shortlog is appended for those interested in (an overview of) the details.
  • So go get the latest rc and kick the tires, to see that nothing has fallen through the cracks, ok?

New in Linux Kernel 3.16 RC5 (Jul 14, 2014)

  • Things are looking normal, and as usual, I _wish_ there was a bit less churn going on since it's getting fairly late in the rc cycle, but honestly, it's not like there is anything that really raises any eyebrows here.
  • The bulk of this is drivers - with acpi and gpu sticking out, if only by a hair. It's pretty mixed, really (hid, hwmon, iio, thermal, clk drivers, libata, pinctrl, etc). There's the usual architecture updates (mostly arm, some powerpc), there's some docbook fixes, and there's a couple of filesystem fixes (f2fs, kernfs and ext4). With a smattering of small core fixes (mainly cgroup) too.

New in Linux Kernel 3.16 RC3 (Jun 30, 2014)

  • We're back on a Sunday release schedule, and things are looking reasonably normal.
  • There's perhaps relatively less driver updates than usual, with most of them being pretty small, but that is probably just a timing thing (ie Greg didn't send his USB/staging changes this week, so driver changes are mostly gpu, networking and sound).
  • As a result misc architecture updates (mips, powerpc, x86, arm) dominate the diff, and there are various random other updates. We've got filesystem updates (aio, nfs and ocfs2), a small batch of mm fixes from Andrew, some networking stuff.etc.
  • The shortlog gives a feel for the changes. The most noticeable to actual users are probably the unbreaking of direct block device read accesses on 32-bit targets, and some x86 vdso regression fixes that caused problems. The rest probably didn't end up affecting very many
  • people, but it's all proper fixes..

New in Linux Kernel 3.16 RC2 (Jun 22, 2014)

  • It's a day early, but tomorrow ends up being inconvenient for me due to being on the road most of the day, so here you are. These days most people send me their pull requests and patches during the week, so it's not like I expect that a Sunday release would have made much of a difference. And it's also not like I didn't have enough changes for making a rc2 release.
  • Anyway, enough excuses. 3.16-rc2 is out, and contains the usual assortment of fixes all over the map. The most unusual part at this point is how the sparc changes stand out (at almost 40% of the patch by bulk), but they are basically all just sparse warning cleanups.
  • Similarly, some Nouveau drm changes standing out size-wise, but again those are largely due to small firmware fixes resulting in big generated changes. The actual real changes are fairly small.
  • Ignoring those two unusually large changes (in lines), everything else looks fairly normal. There are driver changes, some tooling updates (particularly perf), and various other arch updates (arm, s390, unicore32, x86..). And just misc random stuff all over the place - rtmutex, btrfs, yadda yadda.
  • The shortlog is not tiny, but small enough to include here, so you can see the details there if you care.

New in Linux Kernel 3.15 RC8 (Jun 2, 2014)

  • I was really hoping that rc7 would be the last rc, but it appears that reality is once against conspiring against my well-laid plans, and is forcing me to do an rc8. It's not like there were a lot of changes, but the last-minute dcache fixes in particular made it not really sane to just make a final release without another week of testing.
  • Now, normally, an rc8 isn't really a big deal - 3.15 is one of the biggest (if not _the_ biggest) releases in a long time, and we do rc8's with some regularity. It may not be every release, but I think it's about a fifty-fifty chance whether any particular release goes to rc8. So I shouldn't be upset, and I'm certainly not surprised.
  • No, the real reason I was hoping that we wouldn't need to do an rc8 for 3.15 is that school is out in two weeks, and we're doing our family vacation immediately after that. And I'd hate to have yet another "Linus is traveling during the merge window" thing. Normally I have been luckier with my trips than that.
  • Now, I'll have internet, and I *could* do the merge window while on vacation with the family. I'd just prefer not to.
  • SO... Let's try something new. I suspect most people are ready to start the merge window, and we could try how it would be to overlap the first week of the merge window with the last week of the previous release. Most of the submaintainers already use git branches actively, so I doubt anybody will find it too confusing if I end up having a "next" branch for a week that contains the stuff I pull for 3.16.
  • So let's try to see how well that works - the last weeks of the release tends to be me just waiting around to make sure nothing bad is happening, so doing this kind of overlapping development *should* work fine. Maybe it works so well that we'll end up doing it in the future even if there *isn't* some kind of scheduling conflict that makes me want to start the merge window before I'm 100% comfortable doing the release for the previous version.
  • And it's not like I think rc8 is in any way broken. I just don't feel comfortable doing a real 3.15 release without a _bit_ more time for people to use the fixed dentry code.
  • Anyway, apart from the dcache changes, there's a lot of random smaller stuff. One one-liner in particular is interesting: Minchan Kim had a load that basically ate up all the kernel stack on x86-64, and so this finally does something I've been trying to delay for a long time - it expands the stack to 16kB. I think all other 64-bit architectures have
  • done that a long time ago already, so it's not exactly shocking, but it's a somewhat fundamental change on one of the main architectures.

New in Linux Kernel 3.15 RC6 (May 22, 2014)

  • Due to travels and related lack of internet access, the rc releases haven't been following the normal Sunday release cycle, and since I caught up with what happened while I was off-line, rather than wait until next Sunday to reset to the normal cycle, I'm just releasing rc6 now mid-week from Tokyo.
  • With rc5 being a couple of days early, and rc6 being several days late, we had almost two weeks in between them. The size of the result is not twice as large, though, hopefully partially because it's getting late in the rc series and things are supposed to be calming
  • down, but presumably also because some submaintainers just didn't send their pull requests because they knew I was off-line. Whatever the reason, things don't look bad.
  • The patch distribution looks pretty normal too. Mostly drivers (acpi, sound, media, i915, clk, pci..) with the bulk of the rest being various arch updates (notably MIPS, but arm and parisc too). And a smattering of other random stuff in filesystems and core kernel code.
  • Anyway, depending a bit on what else is pending, I'll probably stretch out rc7 to get back to the normal Sunday schedule, and depending on how things look by then that may or may not be the last rc.

New in Linux Kernel 3.15 RC5 (May 9, 2014)

  • Yes, I'm aware that this is two days early. The normal schedule has been for me to do Sunday releases, but this time around I have a combination of travel (which would have pushed the release to Saturday morning from the airport as is oft my wont when traveling) and the fact that rc5 has actually already grown to be larger than rc3 or rc4 were.
  • So instead of pushing it to the last minute before I board a plane and am off-line for a week, I decided that there is absolutely zero reason for that kind of just-under-the-wire release timing. I'd rather do a leisurely release on a Friday afternoon than a hurried one tomorrow morning before then disappearing for a week.
  • Anyway, enough explaining. rc5 is out there, and while I'd have been happier if it had been as small as rc4 was, it seems to all be solid fixes (famous last words). The interesting dcache list corruption I mentioned as being pending for rc4 is in, and it would be lovely if you have any VFS layer stress-testing that interacts with memory pressure, but the race was tiny to begin with, and the fix actually cleaned things up a lot and removed more lines than it added, so I feel good about it.
  • Apart from that one interesting really core change (where "really core" is defined as "an area I personally care about and muck around with", and not meant to be a value statement in any other way ;), it all looks boringly familiar: 55% drivers, 20% architecture updates, and 25% misc (filesystems, core networking, VM, etc).
  • And while rc5 may be bigger than rc3/4 were, it's not like it is worrying. This merge window was bigger than most, and the fact that rc5 is then slightly bigger than most isn't something that worries me overmuch. And since rc4 was smaller than usual, it all evens out. But I really *will* be entirely nreachable all next week, so get your testing in, because the -git tree will be very quiet.

New in Linux Kernel 3.15 RC4 (May 5, 2014)

  • Nothing particularly unusual going on. 45% drivers (drm, sound, md, pin-control, acpi etc), 40% arch (mainly powerpc/powernv, but x86 and arm too), 15% misc (perf tooling, documentation updates, core code). The appended shortlog gives some kind of overview of the details without being _too_ big.
  • There's a few known things pending still (pending fix for some interesting dentry list corruption, for example - not that any remotely normal use will likely ever hit it), but on the whole things are fairly calm and nothing horribly scary. We're in the middle of the calming-down period, so that's just how I like it.
  • But the more testing we get, the better, so please do give this a whirl.

New in Linux Kernel 3.15 RC2 (Apr 22, 2014)

  • It's been a week, so here's another rc. And while -rc1 was one of the biggest rc's in memory, rc2 looks fairly normal. We had a few niggling issues fixed, but it really wasn't anything horribly worse than usual. It might be a *bit* bigger than most -rc2's, but let's wait to see after rc3 whether things are actually busier than usual. Quite often rc2 is calmer than rc3, with it taking a week for some issues to show up.
  • As to what happened during last week: the *bulk* of the rc2 patch is actually the removal of the rtl8187se staging driver, since there's a proper non-staging one. That's literally just over half of the actual patch. But even if you ignore just that bulk removal, other driver
  • changes account for about two thirds of the rest (gpu, networking, fbdev file renames, ipmi, infiniband, pincontrol... you name it). The drm stuff is probably most noticeable.
  • Outside of drivers, we've got the usual arch updates (mostly x86 and s390, some parisc) and some Documentation updates. Various networking fixes and filesystem updates (cifs, sysfs, xfs). And some tooling stuff.

New in Linux Kernel 3.14 (Mar 31, 2014)

  • Deadline scheduling class for better real time scheduling
  • zram: Memory compression mechanism considered stable
  • Trigger support for tracing events
  • Userspace probes access to all arguments

New in Linux Kernel 3.14 RC6 (Mar 10, 2014)

  • We're getting closer to the end of the rc cycle, and I have to admit that I would have wished for a less bumpy ride.
  • There haven't been any huge problems, but there's been quite a few small bumps that shouldn't happen this late in the release cycle. And rc6 is noticeably bigger than rc5 was, as well.
  • So I'm really hoping that the upcoming week will be calmer, because otherwise I'll start thing rc8 and even rc9..
  • That said, there's nothing really fundamentally scary here. Small stupid mistakes, and a few late reverts of commits that turned out to not be so great, but the bulk is trivial fixes. So I'm still reasonably optimistic.

New in Linux Kernel 3.14 RC5 (Mar 3, 2014)

  • Things were fairly calm, and fairly normal. Drivers account for just under 60% of the patch (sound dominates due to a couple of patches that are larger but trivial, but there's various misc oneliners all over). The rest is mostly arch updates (mainly powerpc and xtensa), and then there's a smattering of small stuff elsewhere.

New in Linux Kernel 3.14 RC4 (Feb 24, 2014)

  • The biggest patch in here (accounting for about a sixth of the total) is just DaveJ re-indenting a reiserfs file. Ignoring that whitespace cleanup, the rest is mostly the usual mix of drivers, networking and some architecture updates.

New in Linux Kernel 3.14 RC2 (Feb 10, 2014)

  • It's been pretty quiet, actually, which should make me happy. But I have a suspicious nature, and I'm going to wait to see if the other shoe drops, and people are just lulling me into a false sense of security. Because I know kernel developers, and they are sneaky. I suspect Davem (to pick somebody not at random) is giggling to himself, waiting for this release message, planning to send me some big-ass pull request tomorrow. Because that's the kind of people you guys are.
  • Anyway, what little there was looks normal: roughly two thirds drivers (gpu, block, media, misc), with almost half the remaining patches being architecture updates (x86, s390 and arm64). With the rest being filesystems (vfs, nfs, ocfs, btrfs and some kernfs fixes), some mm noise, and tooling (perf).
  • Shortlog appended, which doesn't always happen for rc2.

New in Linux Kernel 3.13 RC8 (Jan 12, 2014)

  • rc8 has the usual "two thirds drivers, one third random" mix, with "random" having some arch updates (arm and parisc this time), but is mostly network updates. A fair chunk of the driver changes are network drivers too, for that matter.

New in Linux Kernel 3.13 RC7 (Jan 5, 2014)

  • In this rc, about half of the updates are networking (both drivers and core), and the rest is a mix of other drivers (gpu, input, pci core, some random of patch as well) and arch updates (s390 and powerpc, some arm noise). And with some random stuff thrown in (cifs/gfs2, some mm stuff from Andrew, etc).

New in Linux Kernel 3.13 RC6 (Dec 30, 2013)

  • As expected, things have been quiet over the holiday week. So various small random updates: drivers (infiniband, gpu, cpufreq, libata, block), some small filesystem fixes (ext4/jbd2), and a few ARM SoC things. Tiny x86, percpu and cgroup fixes.

New in Linux Kernel 3.13 RC5 (Dec 22, 2013)

  • Ho ho ho, Christmas is almost upon us, and -rc5 is the last rc before most of us gorge ourselves into insensibility. Or cry into our lonely beers. Or go out for Chinese food. Or whatever you happen to do.
  • Things seem to be slowly calming down, and I expect that the next week is going to be calmer yet, for all the obvious reasons. This might also be a good time to say that even _if_ things continue to calm down, I think we'll be going to at least -rc8 regardless, since LCA is fairly early this year, and I won't be opening the merge window for 3.14 until after I'm back from those travels.
  • Anyway, about rc5: about 40% drivers (gpu, networking, sound, misc-you-name-it), 15% architecture updates (mainly powerpc this time), 10% filesystems (ceph/cifs), 10% documentation, and the rest "misc", including some core kernel (scheduler) and mm (numa) fixes.
  • Nothing really exciting stands out. The bugs I was involved with were all sufficiently subtle and unusual that I didn't feel like they raised any red flags at this point, which is just how I want it. It's the "how did that ever even pass cursory testing" bugs that make me upset, and if those existed, people were appropriately ashamed and quiet about them ;)
  • So despite me planning on dragging out the rc's a bit, there doesn't actually look to be any real technical reason for doing that, at least so far. It all looks good, so please jump in and help test,

New in Linux Kernel 3.13 RC4 (Dec 15, 2013)

  • So I delayed this a couple of days to get back to my normal Sunday release schedule, but I'm not entirely happy with the result. Things aren't calming down the way they should be, and -rc4 is bigger than previous rc's. And I don't think I can just blame the two extra days.
  • Anyway, what that means from a practical standpoint is that I'm going to be *very* grumpy at anybody who sends me unnecessary crap. If it's not regression or marked for stable, then just don't send it to me. Because you *will* be called names if you can't follow those simple rules. Comprende?
  • Anyway, the bulk of changes for rc4 is drivers (notably networking and gpu, but there's usb, input and media driver updates too). Aside from that, there are the usual arch updates (mainly ARM) and the slightly less usual selinux updates. And generic networking, with some random stuff thrown in for good measure. The shortlog isn't very short, but it's appended for your reading pleasure.
  • We're obviously heading for the holiday season, and I'm really hoping that will help calm things down too for the rest of the release candidates...

New in Linux Kernel 3.13 RC3 (Dec 6, 2013)

  • .. I'm still on a Friday release schedule, although I hope that changes soon - the reason I didn't drag this one out to Sunday is that it's already big enough, and I'll wait until things start calming down.
  • Which they really should, at this point. Hint hint. I'll start shouting at people for sending me stuff that isn't appropriate as we're starting to get later into the release candidates.
  • That said, it's not like rc3 is somehow unmanageably large or that anything particularly scary has happened. I'd have *liked* for it to be smaller, but I always do.. And nothing particularly nasty stands out here.
  • The bulk here is drivers (net, scsi, sound, crypto..) and ARM DT stuff, but there's the usual randon stuff too, with arch updates (pa-risc, more ARM, x86) and some filesystem and networking updates.

New in Linux Kernel 3.12 RC7 (Oct 28, 2013)

  • The KS week is over, and thus the seventh - and likely the last - rc for 3.12 is out, and I'm back on the normal Sunday schedule.
  • The slowdown in -rc sizes sadly reversed itself here, mostly due to the networking updates that hadn't come in for rc5-rc6. You can see that in the diffstat, with more than 50% being networking (both driver and core) patches. The rest is generally other drivers (gpu, media, scsi, thermal, HID) and some smaller arch updates (s390, parisc, x86).
  • Nothing looks particularly shocking, though, so we're still on track for 3.12. Which does mean, that with me having more travel coming up, the 3.13 merge window will likely end up being a bit messed up.
  • I can usually schedule around these kinds of things, but with two different trips and just a week in between, I have the choice of either just delaying 3.12 for no good reason, or just saying "ok, we'll just keep the merge window open a bit longer because I won't be able to be as responsive as I should be".
  • But who knows. If something particularly worrisome comes up during the upcoming week, I might just say "Ok, we'll do an rc8 instead". So I'm keeping my options open.

New in Linux Kernel 3.12 RC6 (Oct 19, 2013)

  • I'm at PDX, about to fly out to the kernel summit, and it has almost become a tradition to do an rc release using the airport wifi. So here it is..
  • The patch is still busily being pushed out, but the git trees are up-to-date, and the tar-file should already be out. Nothing major happened last week., and the upcoming week is likely to be quiet too, since a lot of core maintainers will be in Edinburgh for the KS.
  • Shortlog with more details appended, but the overview is just mainly driver updates. USB, infiniband, acpi.. Some documentation and Cifs updates, and the rest is random noise.

New in Linux Kernel 3.12 RC3 (Sep 30, 2013)

  • I'm back to a Sunday release schedule, so here it is, rc3.
  • Nothing really special stands out. There's a fair amount of churn in mm, which is unusual at this point, but that's all reverts: during the merge window Andrew sent some changes that were still being discussed, and we're reverting them for now.
  • If you ignore the mm changes, the rest looks very normal: the bulk is drivers (gpu, dm/bcache, usb, sound..), with the usual sprinkling of architecture (powerpc, x86, arm, mips) and filesystem (udf, xfs, reiserfs) changes. And some perf tooling.
  • And we had some performance-tweaking of the new lockref support for ARM and s390.
  • On the whole, nothing really appears very scary. Go forth and test.

New in Linux Kernel 3.11 RC4 (Aug 5, 2013)

  • We've got some arch updates (arm, parisc), but most of this is drivers (mostly networking, usb and some drm updates). There's also some core networking changes. And the printk code movement looks big if you don't do git renames (ie like the patches I upload).

New in Linux Kernel 3.11 RC3 (Jul 29, 2013)

  • And please just forget about me telling you people to get back to work last week. You got. -rc3 has about 50% more commits than -rc2 did. Part of it is that a few people missed rc2, but part of it is that people just sent me more. Please stop. It's summer. It's nice outside. Take the kids to the pool or something. Send me just regression fixes.
  • Otherwise I'll have to start shouting at people again.
  • Anyway, remember how I asked people to test the backlight changes in rc2 because things like that have really bad track records? Yup. That all got reverted. It fixed things for some people, but regressed for others, and we don't do that "one step forward, two steps back" thing. But never fear, we have top people looking at it.
  • The crc t10 dif crypto supprt got reverted too, since there were initrd infrastructure problems with it.
  • But the bulk here is some block driver updates (drbd, rsxx, xen, bcache, libata), and the drm changes (mostly qxl, but there's changes to the "big tree" too: radeon, intel, nouveau). And various random other drivers - usb, scsi, pincontrol, etc.
  • There's also the usual arch updates (mainly alpha, arm, powerpc).
  • Full shortlog since rc2 appended. It's big enough that I debated doing just a merge-window style "mergelog" overview, but hey, maybe people enjoy this kind of detail?

New in Linux Kernel 3.10 RC4 (Jun 3, 2013)

  • Another week, another -rc. But this time (at least for now) only as a git tree - for people actually using the tar-balls and patches, I apologize, but I'm a complete moron, and didn't install kup, its perl dependencies, and my kup release scripts on the pixel before the trip.
  • And while I can read and write email, and git is fine with just a few (flaky) kB/s internet throughput I have access to right now, installing the perl packages etc seems to be a pipe dream.
  • I suspect nobody actually uses the tar-balls and patches, since git is so much more convenient and efficient, so hopefully nobody cares. But I'll rectify the lack eventually. Hopefully within a day or two, as my "yum update" actually completes. And if not in a day or two, then when I get back home a few days later.
  • Anyway, rc4 is smaller than rc3 (yay!). But it could certainly be smaller still (boo!). There's the usual gaggle of driver fixes (drm, pinctrl, scsi target, fbdev, xen), but also filesystems (cifs, xfs, with small fixes to reiserfs and nfs).
  • And arch updates: m68k (mostly defconfig updates), powerpc, arm and x86.

New in Linux Kernel 3.7 RC1 (Oct 15, 2012)

  • the "uapi" include file cleanups. The idea is that the stuff exported to user space should now be found under include/uapi and arch/$(ARCH)/include/uapi.
  • arm64 architecture inclusion
  • arm multiplatform code
  • ARM virtualization and Xen support.
  • user namespaces are coming back in a workable form.
  • signed kernel modules
  • nice cleanups: workqueues (Tejun Heo) and generic execve/kernel_thread (Al Viro)
  • Mergelog since 3.6:
  • GFS2 updates from Steven Whitehouse
  • regmap updates from Mark Brown
  • regulator updates from Mark Brown
  • the trivial tree from Jiri Kosina
  • HID updates from Jiri Kosina
  • localmodconfig fixes from Steven Rostedt
  • ktest fix from Steven Rostedt
  • RCU changes from Ingo Molnar
  • core kernel fixes from Ingo Molnar
  • core locking changes from Ingo Molnar
  • trivial irq core update from Ingo Molnar
  • perf update from Ingo Molnar
  • perf fix from Ingo Molnar
  • scheduler changes from Ingo Molnar
  • timer changes from Ingo Molnar
  • x86/apic changes from Ingo Molnar
  • x86/asm changes from Ingo Molnar
  • x86/build changes from Ingo Molnar
  • x86/cleanups from Ingo Molnar
  • x86/cpu and x86/cpufeature from Ingo Molnar
  • x86 debug update from Ingo Molnar
  • x86/EFI changes from Ingo Molnar
  • x86/fpu update from Ingo Molnar
  • x86/MCE update from Ingo Molnar
  • x86/mm changes from Ingo Molnar
  • x86/platform changes from Ingo Molnar
  • x86/microcode changes from Ingo Molnar
  • s390 updates from Martin Schwidefsky
  • arm64 support from Catalin Marinas
  • PCI changes from Bjorn Helgaas
  • clk framework update from Michael Turquette
  • char/misc driver merge from Greg Kroah-Hartman
  • driver core merge from Greg Kroah-Hartman
  • staging tree update from Greg Kroah-Hartman
  • TTY changes from Greg Kroah-Hartman
  • USB changes from Greg Kroah-Hartman
  • hwmon updates from Guenter Roeck
  • dlm updates from David Teigland
  • m68k updates from Geert Uytterhoeven
  • ia64 update from Tony Luck
  • x86/smap support from Ingo Molnar
  • CIFS updates from Steve French
  • non-critical ARM soc bug fixes from Olof Johansson
  • ARM soc general cleanups from Olof Johansson
  • ARM soc MAINTAINERS updates from Olof Johansson
  • ARM soc-specific updates from Olof Johansson
  • ARM soc device tree updates from Olof Johansson
  • ARM soc cleanups, part 2 from Olof Johansson
  • ARM soc-specific updates, take 2 from Olof Johansson
  • ARM soc driver specific changes from Olof Johansson
  • ARM soc board specific updates from Olof Johansson
  • ARM soc device tree updates, take 2 from Olof Johansson
  • ARM soc documentation updates from Olof Johansson
  • ARM soc multiplatform enablement from Olof Johansson
  • workqueue changes from Tejun Heo
  • cgroup updates from Tejun Heo
  • cgroup hierarchy update from Tejun Heo
  • user namespace changes from Eric Biederman
  • sparc updates from David Miller
  • networking changes from David Miller
  • GPIO changes from Linus Walleij
  • pinctrl changes from Linus Walleij
  • input updates from Dmitry Torokhov
  • infiniband updates from Roland Dreier
  • spi updates from Mark Brown
  • libata changes from Jeff Garzik
  • power management updates from Rafael J Wysocki
  • first round of SCSI updates from James Bottomley
  • CMA and DMA-mapping updates from Marek Szyprowski
  • vfs update from Al Viro
  • xfs update from Ben Myers
  • ubifs changes from Artem Bityutskiy
  • UBI changes from Artem Bityutskiy
  • security subsystem updates from James Morris
  • frontswap update from Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk
  • Xen update from Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk
  • sparc fixes from David Miller
  • CRIS changes from Jesper Nilsson
  • JFS update from Dave Kleikamp
  • devicetree updates from Rob Herring
  • preparatory patches for user API disintegration from David Howells
  • firewire updates from Stefan Richter
  • user namespace compile fix from Eric W Biederman
  • drm merge (part 1) from Dave Airlie
  • crypto update from Herbert Xu
  • remoteproc update from Ohad Ben-Cohen
  • ext3 & udf fixes from Jan Kara
  • KVM updates from Avi Kivity
  • MFD changes from Samuel Ortiz
  • misc patches from Andrew Morton
  • networking changes from David Miller
  • powerpc updates from Benjamin Herrenschmidt
  • ARM Xen support from Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk
  • SLAB changes from Pekka Enberg
  • UAPI disintegration fixes from David Howells
  • infiniband changes from Roland Dreier
  • battery updates from Anton Vorontsov
  • pstore changes from Anton Vorontsov
  • media updates from Mauro Carvalho Chehab
  • ARM soc defconfig updates from Olof Johansson
  • late ARM soc platform updates from Olof Johansson
  • virtio changes from Rusty Russell
  • m68knommu arch updates from Greg Ungerer
  • IMA bugfix (security subsystem) from James Morris
  • microblaze arch updates from Michal Simek
  • ARM updates from Russell King
  • IOMMU updates from Joerg Roedel
  • i2c updates from Jean Delvare
  • ext4 updates from Ted Ts'o
  • ceph updates from Sage Weil
  • kbuild fixes from Michal Marek
  • UBI fastmap changes from Artem Bityutskiy
  • sparc changes from David S Miller
  • arm64 changes from Catalin Marinas
  • sound updates from Takashi Iwai
  • exofs update from Boaz Harrosh
  • asm-generic updates from Arnd Bergmann
  • MIPS update from Ralf Baechle
  • blackfin update from Bob Liu
  • Xtensa patchset from Chris Zankel
  • patches from Andrew Morton
  • CIFS fixes from Steve French
  • btrfs update from Chris Mason
  • MTD updates from David Woodhouse
  • MMC updates from Chris Ball
  • slave-dmaengine updates from Vinod Koul
  • sparc update from David Miller
  • networking updates from David Miller
  • UML changes from Richard Weinberger
  • generic execve() changes from Al Viro
  • nouveau drm fixes from Dave Airlie
  • second s390 update from Martin Schwidefsky
  • scsi target updates from Nicholas Bellinger
  • LED subsystem update from Bryan Wu
  • pwm changes from Thierry Reding
  • NFS client updates from Trond Myklebust
  • hwmon updates from Jean Delvare
  • vfio fixes from Alex Williamson
  • a firewire fix from Stefan Richter
  • block IO update from Jens Axboe
  • misc fixes from Andrew Morton
  • branch 'akpm' (Fixups from Andrew)
  • ARM SoC fixes from Olof Johansson
  • i2c-embedded changes from Wolfram Sang
  • v9fs update from Eric Van Hensbergen
  • fbdev updates from Florian Tobias Schandinat
  • kbuild changes from Michal Marek
  • kconfig changes from Michal Marek
  • kbuild misc changes from Michal Marek
  • writeback fixes from Fengguang Wu
  • pile 2 of execve and kernel_thread unification work from Al Viro
  • pile 2 of vfs updates from Al Viro
  • sound updates #2 from Takashi Iwai
  • second set of ARM updates from Russell King
  • second set of pinctrl patches from Linus Walleij
  • second set of media updates from Mauro Carvalho Chehab
  • RCU fixes from Ingo Molnar
  • scheduler fixes from Ingo Molnar
  • timer core update from Thomas Gleixner
  • SLAB fix from Pekka Enberg
  • Xen fixes from Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk
  • third pile of VFS updates from Al Viro
  • third pile of kernel_execve() patches from Al Viro
  • perf updates from Ingo Molnar
  • ia64 UAPI changes from Tony Luck
  • tile arch update from Chris Metcalf
  • Sparc updates from David Miller
  • networking updates from David Miller
  • nfsd update from J Bruce Fields
  • input layer updates from Dmitry Torokhov
  • misc SCSI updates from James Bottomley
  • device-mapper changes from Alasdair G Kergon
  • two more mmc changes from Chris Ball
  • Xen UAPI disintegration from Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk
  • KGDB/KDB fixes and cleanups from Jason Wessel
  • C6X UAPI disintegration from Mark Salter
  • arm64 uapi disintegration from Catalin Marinas
  • powerpc uapi disintegration from Benjamin Herrenschmidt
  • UAPI disintegration for misc arches from David Howells
  • OpenRISC updates from Jonas Bonn
  • ACPI & Thermal updates from Len Brown
  • TPM bugfixes from James Morris
  • md updates from NeilBrown
  • user namespace compile fixes from Eric W Biederman
  • OpenRISC uapi disintegration from Jonas Bonn
  • spi UAPI disintegration from David Howells
  • UAPI disintegration for include/linux/{,byteorder/}*.h from David Howells
  • ARM update from Russell King
  • module signing support from Rusty Russell
  • MIPS update from Ralf Baechle

New in Linux Kernel 3.3 RC1 (Jan 20, 2012)

  • So the subject says it all. It's been two weeks(+a day), and 3.3-rc1 is now out.
  • There are a couple of trees I haven't merged on purpose, and there may
  • be a few trees I overlooked by mistake. The "on purpose" ones were
  • things that looked unfamiliar and I felt I didn't have the bandwidth
  • to check. The "mistake" ones would just be things I missed due to
  • being busy.
  • And it really was a pretty busy merge window. I don't know *why* it
  • felt so busy, though. In pure numbers, the merge window seems to have
  • been pretty normal - the number of merges and regular commits are
  • right where you'd expect them. Part of it was spending what felt like
  • (and I think was) a couple of days chasing down two independent
  • suspend/resume regressions on my laptop, part of it was a couple of
  • just bad pull requests, and some of it was some of the independent
  • discussions that were on-going. But none of that is unheard of, so
  • what do I know..
  • Anyway, it's out now, and I'm taking off early for a weekend of beer,
  • skiing and poker (not necessarily in that order: "don't drink and
  • ski"). No email.
  • So if you felt that your pull request was overlooked by mistake (or
  • intentionally, but really not so scary that you think I should have a
  • really easy time checking it), you have a couple of days to marshal
  • your arguments for why I should pull it after all.
  • And if you didn't send your pull request in time: "Phhhthrthtpt!". No
  • arguments for that one.
  • (Stats for those that like them: 20% arch updates (arm, power, mips,
  • x86), 60% drivers (networking - wireless in particular, staging,
  • media, dri, sound, misc - including getting rid of 'struct sysdev'),
  • and 20% random stuff: filesystems, networking, perf etc)

New in Linux Kernel 3.0 RC2 (Jun 6, 2011)

  • You all know the drill by now: another week, another -rc.
  • It's been reasonably quiet, although the btrfs update is bigger than I was hoping for. Other than that, it's mostly driver fixes, some ubifs updates too, and a few reverts for the early regressions.
  • But -rc2 is already small enough that it easily fits as an appended shortlog, and hopefully things will stay calm. Of course, part of that may be due to other people also havin been busy traveling, so let's see (and hope for the best). And I haven't been super-eager to pull, so there is a couple of pending requests still in my mail queue.