Linux 3.4-rc5: Annoying, But Not Hugely Scary

The Linux 3.4-rc5 kernel was released on Sunday with an increased number of changes over its predecessor, which Linus Torvalds describes as annoying, but it shouldn't be "hugely scary" for those testing it out.

As said in the announcement, most of the changes are spread out between the drivers, architecture, and file-systems, with the Linux driver work obviously taking up the biggest chunk of work over the past eight days representing this fifth release candidate. Besides an uptick in changes for 3.4-rc5, like the previous RCs, most of the work landed on Friday and Saturday of the week.

For those wondering about the new features in the Linux 3.4 kernel, read these Phoronix articles.

Another week, another -rc. Techically it's eight days - I delayed it for a day waiting for some testing.

And like -rc4, quite a bit of the changes came in on Friday (with some more coming in yesterday). And we haven't been calming down, quite the reverse. -rc5 has almost 50% more commits than -rc4 had. Not good.

That said, I don't think there is anything hugely scary there. Annoying, yes (by now I really detest the nasty autofs ABI issues I was fighting the last few days, for example), and I'd be happier if things had been quieter, but much of this is really pretty small and trivial. It's fairly spread out: ~50% drivers, 20% arch, 15% fs (mainly btrfs and nfs), 5% networking, and random noise.

The shortlog probably describes it best, because it really is just a collection of fairly random fixes.