From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...>
Subject: Linux 2.6.25-rc1
Date: Feb 10, 8:44 pm 2008

Ok, it's a bloody large -rc (as was 24-rc1, for that matter), probably

because the 2.6.24 release cycle dragged out, so people had a lot of

things pending.
The full diff is something like 11MB and 1.4M lines of diffs, with the

bulk of the stuff being in architecture updates and drivers.
Just to have some fun, I did trivial statistics, and of the 1.4M lines of

diffs, about 38% - 530k lines - were in architecture files (400k+ lines of

diffs in arch/, 100k+ lines of diffs in include/asm-*), and another big

chunk is in drivers (including sound) at about 44% - 610k lines - of

changes.
The rest comes in much smaller, but still noticeable is networking (8% -

110k lines), with filesystems at 4%, and documentation at about 2%. The

remaining crumbles being spread out mostly over block layer, crypto,

kernel core, and security layer updates (ie SElinux and smack).
[ Just to make it more obvious how driver and architecture-dominated the

  kernel changelogs are: just the network driver changes were 200kloc, and

  even just infiniband - which came way behind not just networking

  drivers, but also DVB, SCSI, char and ide - generated more lines of code

  changed than the "core" kernel code under the kernel/ subdirectory. 
  And that's despite the fact that the "core" code was actually under a

  fairly active merge cycle, with a lot of namespace- and scheduling-

  related stuff. ]
Now, some of that is files moving about and other reorganizations (SH and

to a lesser degree sparc starting to merge 32-bit and 64-bit

architectures), but most of it really is just the normal flood of changes

and new driver or platform support.
The full shortlog is half a meg in size (and the diffstat is even bigger),

so I won't be including that here, but some things that may be worth

pointing out not because they are big in line sizes, but because they have

potential to be noticed by more people:
 - the intel graphics driver is starting to do suspend/resume natively

   (ie even without X support), which is a welcome sign of the times and

   may help some people. It helped on my laptop.
 - Other suspend/resume changes in device access ordering etc, and the

   usual ACPI changes means that we really want reports from people about

   this all even if you don't have intel graphics.
 - Lots of cleanups from the x86 merge (making more and more use of common

   files), but also the big page attribute stuff is in and caused a fair

   amount of churn, and while most of the issues should have been very

   obvious and all got fixed, this is definitely one of those things that

   we want a lot of very wide testing of to make sure nothing regressed.
 - fair number of changes to things like the legacy IDE drivers too, and a

   totally new driver for the very common PCIE version of the Intel e1000

   network card etc.
 - .. and I've probably totally forgotten about tons of other stuff I

   should have mentioned, but the point is that not only do we have lots

   of new core, we do have a fair amout of changes to basic stuff that can

   actually affect perfectly bog-standard hardware setups.
So give it all a good testing. 
		Linus

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