Linux kernel 5.17-rc6 released
Nobody can claim that last week was *normal*, but whatever crazy things are going on in the world (and I personally had "Zombie apocalypse" on my bingo card, not "Putin has a mental breakdown"), it doesn't seem to have affected the kernel much.
Things continue to look normal both in commit numbers and in diffstats. We have the usual bulk being drivers (networking, gpu, iio, clk, and usb stand out, but there's a smattering of other stuff), with the rest being mixed. The only thing that stands out as a bit unusual is some further btrfs defrag fixes. But even they stand out not so much because they are enormous, as just because they are bigger than most of the rest, which is pretty small.
Other notable areas: core networking, tracing, and selftests. As usual, details are in the appended shortlog.
While things look reasonably normal, we _are_ getting pretty late in the release, and we still have a number of known regressions. They don't seem all that big and scary, but some of them were reported right after the rc1 release, so they are getting a bit long in the tooth. I'd hate to have to delay 5.17 just because of them, and I'm starting to be a bit worried here. I think all the affected maintainers know who they are...
So if you are a subsystem maintainer, and you have one of those regressions on your list, please go make them a priority. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, please do look up the reports by regzbot and Guenter Roeck. I added links below to make it really easy.
But on the whole things look fine. Just a few remaining warts is all. But the more testing to verify, the better.
Linus
Full source: https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/t/linux-5.17-rc6.tar.gz
Patch: https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/p/v5.17-rc6/v5.16
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/ds/v5.17-rc6/v5.17-rc5
Linux Torvalds has announced the sixth release candidate for the upcoming Linux kernel 5.17.
