So there it is. Gone are the 2.6. days, and 3.0 is out.

This obviously also opens the merge window for the next kernel, which
will be 3.1. The stable team will take the third digit, so 3.0.1 will
be the first stable release based on 3.0.

As already mentioned several times, there are no special landmark
features or incompatibilities related to the version number change,
it's simply a way to drop an inconvenient numbering system in honor of
twenty years of Linux. In fact, the 3.0 merge window was calmer than
most, and apart from some excitement from RCU I'd have called it
really smooth. Which is not to say that there may not be bugs, but if
anything, there are hopefully fewer than usual, rather than the normal
".0" problems.

And as I already mentioned yesterday, I'm hoping the 3.1 merge window
will be calm too, because due to the delays the latter half of the
merge window will fall into my vacation time. I briefly considered
simply waiting two extra weeks, but quite frankly, that wouldn't
really have solved anything (it would have made the merge window
instead fall into LinuxCon and my divemaster weekends).

So I'm going to try to keep to the normal two-week merge window, but
if it ends up being too busy for me to keep up, I may end up extending
the window just so that I can merge everything. However, even if that
happens, that will *not* mean that I will accept big pull requests for
longer, it just means that I may end up delaying things to catch up
with timely merge requests.

That said, judging by past experience, the summer merge windows often
tend to be quieter, so maybe I worry needlessly. Much of Europe is
starting to go on vacation, and parts of the US are being fried to a
crisp, so maybe 3.1 will be calm too.

Anyway, what has changed since -rc7 is mainly some RCU interactions
with the scheduler, and the RCU problems should hopefully be behind
us. The pathname lookup race is also fixed. There's a few DRI fixes
(i915 modesetting, and some Radeon fixes), and Al walked through some
more esoteric VFS d_lock issues. Other than that it's really pretty
small and random.

The shortlog from -rc7 is appended, the bigger "everything since
2.6.39" list is obviously unmanageable.

Linus