Linux-6.8.0

Linux 6.8

From: Linus Torvalds

Date: Sun Mar 10 2024 - 17:07:07 EST

So it took a bit longer for the commit counts to come down this
release than I tend to prefer, but a lot of that seemed to be about
various selftest updates (networking in particular) rather than any
actual real sign of problems. And the last two weeks have been pretty
quiet, so I feel there's no real reason to delay 6.8. We always have
some straggling work, and we'll end up having some of it pushed to
stable rather than hold up the new code. Nothing worrisome enough to
keep the regular release schedule from happening.

As usual, the shortlog below is just for the last week since rc7, the
overall changes in 6.8 are obviously much much bigger. This is not the
historically big release that 6.7 was - we seem to be back to a fairly
average release size for the last few years. You can see it in the
overall diffstats too - this looks like an average release in pretty
much all respects, and we don't have (for example) any obvious big new
filesystems or architectures. I think the biggest single new thing in
6.8 is probably the new Xe drm driver, but honestly, the big bulk of
changes are just various random updates and fixes all over.

Just as it should be.

In a sea of normality, one thing that stands out is a bit of random
git numerology. This is the last mainline kernel to have less than
ten million git objects. In fact, we're at 9.996 million objects, so
we got really close to crossing that not-milestone if it hadn't been
for the nice calming down in the last couple of weeks. Other trees -
notably linux-next - obviously are already comfortably over that
limit.

Of course, there is absolutely nothing special about it apart from a
nice round number. Git doesn't care.

Anyway, this all obviously means that tomorrow the merge window for
6.9 opens, and I already have several pull requests pending. Thanks to
everybody who sent in early pull requests, you know who you are. But
before that excitement commences, please do spend a bit of time with
the now boring old status quo and give 6.8 a good test, ok?

Linus

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