Linus Torvalds On Linux 4.19: "This Merge Window Has Been Horrible"

While Linux 4.19 is slated to have a lot of new features as we have been covering now the past week and a half, Linus Torvalds is upset with these big pull requests and some of them being far from perfect -- to the extent of being rejected.

"So this merge window has been horrible," began Torvalds' latest kernel mailing list post. He went on to explain how he is not going to pull XArray support for Linux 4.19. He got turned off when he was going to look at the code because the XArray pull request was based upon the libnvdimm tree, which were changes Torvalds decided against pulling this cycle anyhow due to code quality concerns. And it was not communicated in the pull request why the XArray pull request was based against the libnvdimm changes, which led to another one of Torvalds' famous email blasts.

"Why the f*ck were these features so interlinked to begin with?" ended that message. So no XArray data structure for Linux 4.19 at this stage...

The XArray data structure is intended to eventually replace the Linux kernel's radix tree data usage. XArray offers integrated locking support, memory not being pre-loaded, page cache improvements, and more.

XArray was previously proposed for Linux 4.17 but now it's not going to be merged until at least Linux 5.0 unless Linus has a change of heart on any revised pull request.