FYI, we had the -rc1 release 4 days ago.
That's the task of the maintainers, to review, test and stage patches.
Yes, of course, once they have been tested through - like all arch/x86
patches/fixes. If everything goes well in overnight testing it might be
pushed as early as tomorrow.
This is exactly how it was for 2.6.24: x86.git#mm is where we stage
patches while they are being tested - as you probably are well aware of.
It does not mean they are .26 material (although some of them clearly
are - such as kgdb-light) - most of the fix patches start out there, and
once we trust them we percolate them upwards in the queue and then they
eventually get submitted to Linus. If any bug happens to some of them
then they bubble back to the tail of the queue. For most of the
nontrivial patches, even if they are fixes we want to push upstream, it
is usually at least several days of testing until we trust them.
Ingo
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