Tux Machines

Linux 6.7-rc6

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 18, 2023

Hmm. Nothing really stands out for this rc, which is all good. The

diffstat looks mostly nice and flat (which tends just to be a sign of

"small changes spread out"), with the exception of a couple of random

drivers that just had a bit more churn than others (mellanox and intel

iavf ethernet driver).

The other thing that stands out in the diffstat (although a lot less),

is some removal of some legacy debugging code that harkens back to the

copy-on-write credentials that were introduced in 2008, and that then

caused us to later introduce some self-checking code for that change.

I think we can lay that to rest, since that copy-on-write credential

model has now been around for 15 years and has probably never actually

found anything (the report that caused it is sadly lost in the mists

of time and the long-ago demise of kerneloops.org). In related news,

apparently nobody is silly enough to enable that code anyway.

That one was triggered by a "we should re-order the members of the

'cred' structure for the debug case because one of the types changed

size", but rather than fix that code up, I asked Jens to just remove

the verification code that nobody enables and that isn't really

relevant any more.

But realistically, despite those few blips on the diffstat, most of

this ends up just being various random fixes all over. Filesystems are

maybe showing up more than usual (smb client and server, btrfs,

bcachefs and fuse), and we've got some tracing, mm and selftest

updates, but the bulk of it all is still (as usual) various random

driver fixes.

Shortlog appended. Please do give this a test in between the

last-minute xmas shopping or whatever else is going on ...

LinusRead on