Linux 3.5-rc4 Kernel: Small & Insignificant

Linus Torvalds has done another Sunday -RC release of the Linux 3.5 kernel. So far the trend is that the Linux 3.5 release is looking quite good.

Linus characterized the 200+ commits for Linux 3.5-rc4 as being "all pretty tiny and insignificant." This, of course, is how Linus prefers the late-stage release candidates rather than carrying lots of churn and potentially introducing new regressions rather than fixing outstanding items.

The release announcement can be found at LKML.org and is also embedded below for your convenience.

Another week, another -rc.

Lots of tiny fixes here. I think the biggest (in lines) change is the fixup of the kmsg_dump() functionality that got broken due to the new record-oriented kernel message stuff. And even that really isn't all that big. The other one that stands out in pure number of lines is the XFS 'struct log' rename patch (which also did a couple of trivial whitespace changes).

So while we still have 200+ commits in this -rc, they really are all pretty tiny and insignificant. Sure, if the particular issue they fixed hit you (or you are the developer of those life-changing lines ;), you may disagree with the "insignificant" part, but to me, this is just how I like the -rc's at this point.

The statistics for the -rc are somewhat odd: almost exactly one third each of arch, drivers, and "rest". Usually drivers dominate more than that, but I guess this time we had not just arm platform patches, but also enough random fs and documentation updates to generate that kind of fairly unusual distribution.

Anyway, let's hope the trend with trivial stuff continues, and we'll be looking good for a 3.5 release.

Prominent Linux 3.5 kernel features are talked about here and in many other Phoronix articles.