The Staging Pull Goes In For The Linux 3.8 Kernel

The latest pull request worthy of being mentioned for the Linux 3.8 kernel is the updates to the kernel's staging area.

From Greg Kroah-Hartman's mailing list post:

Here's the big staging tree merge for 3.8-rc1

There's a lot of patches in here, the majority being the comedi rework/cleanup that has been ongoing and is causing a huge reduction in overall code size, which is amazing to watch. We also removed some older drivers (telephony and rts_pstor), and added a new one (fwserial which also came in through the tty tree due to tty api changes, take that one if you get merge conflicts.)

The iio and ipack drivers are moving out of the staging area into their own part of the kernel as they have been cleaned up sufficiently and are working well.

Overall, again a reduction of code:
768 files changed, 31887 insertions(+), 82166 deletions(-)

All of this has been in the linux-next tree for a while.

Greg also mailed in the USB pull request, but it isn't too exciting.

Lots of USB host driver cleanups in here, and a bit of a reorg of the EHCI driver to make it easier for the different EHCI platform drivers to all work together nicer, which was a reduction in overall code. We also deleted some unused firmware files, and got rid of the very old file_storage usb gadget driver that had been broken for a long time. This means we ended up removing way more code than added, always a nice thing to see:
310 files changed, 3028 insertions(+), 10754 deletions(-)