After a release cycle that was unusual in so many (bad) ways, this
last week was really pleasant. Quiet and small, and no last-minute
panics, just small fixes for various issues. I never got a feeling
that I’d need to extend things by yet another week, and 4.15 looks
fine to me.
Half the changes in the last week were misc driver stuff (gpu, input,
networking) with the other half being a mix of networking, core kernel
and arch updates (mainly x86). But all of it is tiny.
So at least we had one good week. This obviously was not a pleasant
release cycle, with the whole meltdown/spectre thing coming in in the
middle of the cycle and not really gelling with our normal release
cycle. The extra two weeks were obviously mainly due to that whole
timing issue.
Also, it is worth pointing out that it’s not like we’re “done” with
spectre/meltdown. There is more work pending.
Linus has been working on this release for a while now as reported by Slashdot