Linux kernel 5.16-rc6 released
Things are calming down, and rc6 is fairly small. That's normal for this time in the release schedule, but it's also normal for this time of year.
And I expect that the next two weeks will be very quiet, and smaller still. But maybe people are bored, maybe people are staying in due to covid picking up again, we'll just see.
Regardless of what happens, I will be making an rc8 - not because this release looks particularly problematic, but simply due to the seasonal holidays. There's no point in releasing a final 5.16 and opening the merge window when people are still on holiday or just coming back. So we'll have at least one extra week of rc this release, even if no nasty issues appear. And if issues _do_ appear, that can obviously delay things further, even if that may look unlikely right now.
Anyway, on the rc6 front, most of the changes here are drivers (mainly networking, usb, and gpu, with some minor noise elsewhere), although the bpf seltest additions do show up in the diff quite prominently too.
There's the usual arch updates too. A good chunk of of those are to dts files, so maybe they count as driver updates.. But there's some other small changes in there: x86 kvm fixes, powerpc, s390 and mips fixes, arm soc fixes etc.
The rest is spread out - filesystems (btrfs, ceph, ciph) and core kernel (mostly networking).
I know most of us are preparing for Christmas, but give it a whirl, ok? How important are those presents (and that family) anyway?
Shortlog appended for people who want to scan the details,
Linus
Full source: https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/t/linux-5.16-rc6.tar.gz
Patch: https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/p/v5.16-rc6/v5.15
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/ds/v5.16-rc6/v5.16-rc5
Linus Torvalds has announced the sixth release candidate for Linux kernel 5.16.
