Linux kernel 5.16-rc1 released
It's been two weeks, and the merge window is thus closed.
I actually anticipated more problems during the merge window than we hit - I was traveling with a laptop for a few days early on in the merge window, and that's usually fairly painful. But - knock wood - it all worked out fine. Partly thanks to a lot of people sending in their pull requests fairly early, so that I could get a bit of a head start before travels. But partly also because I didn't end up having any "uhhuh, things aren't working and now I need to bisect where they broke" events for me on any of my machines. At least yet.
So who knows? Maybe this will be one of those painless releases where everything just works.
Sure.
Anyway, it's not a huge release, although it's also not a remarkably small one like 5.15 was (ok, "remarkably small" is relative, when even such small releases have 10k+ commits).. There's a bit of everything in here, and you can look to the appended mergelog for some kind of flavor, but I guess the folio work is worth mentioning, since it's an unusually core thing that we don't tend to see most releases. The intent is to have a more efficient and type-safe way to specify "head of a group of pages", rather than the page pointers and "compound_head()" and friends.
That said, the folio changes may be unusually core, but they certainly aren't the bulk of the changes. Pretty small in the end, with the real meat and potatoes being all the usual stuff. As always, most of the changes are to drivers (gpu, networking, sound and staging stand out, but it's all over) and architecture code. Hardware support is the bulk of the code, it gets the bulk of the changes. But we obviously have all the normal other updates, with filesystem, networking, and core kernel code. With documentation and tooling support filling the gaps.
And somewhat unusually, our library code stands out in the diffstat, thanks to the big update to a more recent version of upstream libzstd. Anyway, the merge window may have gone about as smoothly as I could hope for, but let's get the whole stabilization phase started with some serious testing, shall we?
Please?
Linus
Full source: https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/t/linux-5.16-rc1.tar.gz
Patch: https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/p/v5.16-rc1/v5.15
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/ds/v5.16-rc1/v5.15
Linus Torvalds has announced the release of the first release candidate for Linux kernel 5.16.
