So the two week merge window has closed, and just as well - because we had
a lot of changes. As usual. Certainly I had no urges to keep the window
open to get those last remaining few megabytes of patches..
The changes follow roughly the same pattern they have before: one third
crap (that is, "staging" - the new random drivers that aren't really ready
to be merged properly but get into the tree in the hope that they'll get
better some day), one third real drivers, and one third "rest".
And just to not break a new tradition, there's a few new filesystems in
this release too:
- "nilfs2" has been brewing for a long while, and is another
log-structured filesystem that does snapshotting. Just google for
'nilfs2' for more details.
- "exofs" implements a filesystem on top of an external object store
(ie not a traditional storage of a linear array of anonymous blocks,
but a "smart" disk that does objects). See
Documentation/filesystems/exofs.txt
for some details.
- fscache/cachefiles is not really a filesystem, but infrastructure to do
caching of remote filesystems in the local filesystem, and NFS and AFS
have been updated to be able to use it.
I'm personally hoping that we'll run out of filesystems rather than
continue this new tradition indefinitely, but we'll see.
But we've got older filesystems updated too: btrfs hopefully uses less
stack space and is usable with a 4k stack, reiserfs got some updates, and
a lot of other filesystems got minor refreshes. The ext3 changes are small
enough to not show up in any dirstat, but hey, I think the fsync latency
changes are interesting and probably more relevant to lots of people than
most of the other changes.
Other? Arch updates - amainly rm, powerpc, sh and x86. Firmware updates.
And lots and lots of driver updates, including some more core
suspend/resume changes (hopefully the last really fundamental ones).
Go out and try it,
Linus
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