I really was hoping that we'd continue to have an increasingly quiet and shrinking rc series. But that was not to be.
rc6 is the biggest rc in number of commits we've had so far for this 5.2 cycle (obviously ignoring the merge window itself and rc1). And it's not just because of trivial patches (although admittedly we have those too), but we obviously had the TCP SACK/fragmentation/mss fixes in there, and they in turn required some fixes too.
Happily we did pick up on the problem quickly - largely thanks to the patches making it into distro kernels quickly and then causing problems for the steam client of all things - but it's still something that doesn't exactly make me get the warm and fuzzies at this point in the release cycle.
I'm also doing this rc on a Saturday, because I am going to spend all of tomorrow on a plane once again. So I'm traveling first for a conference and then for some R&R on a liveaboard, so I'm going to have spotty access to email for a few days, and then for a week I'll be entirely incommunicado. So rc7 will be delayed.
I was thinking that I timed it all really well in what should be the quietest period of the release cycle for me, and now I obviously hope that last week really was a fluke.
Anyway, if something happens when I'm offline, Greg can presumably step up, although he'll have the same conference travel (but presumably at least the reverse jetlag ;)
With all that out of the way, I'm still reasonably optimistic that we're on track for a calm final part of the release, and I don't think there is anything particularly bad on the horizon.
And while we did have some excitement this week, _most_ of it by far was the usual small fixes. Including the by now expected SPDX updates, so the diffstat looks a bit messy again.
Anyway, ignoring the SPDX updates (and you should, even if they dominate the diffstat), about a quarter of the rc6 update is networking (the TCP fixes being a fairly small part of it - the bulk is still network driver and other networking fixes, including bpf). Another quarter is selftests (mostly bpf) and documentation.
The rest other driver updates (gpu, rdma, thunderbolt, usb..) arch updates (x86, risc-v and arm[64]), and misc other updates (overlayfs etc).
But honestly, most of it really is pretty small (again - ignoring the SPDX noise), so despite my misgivings I don't think we're really in trouble.
Shortlog appended for the brave souls who want to look at details,
