The 4.9 Linux kernel has been released

jeremy · 12-12-2016, 10:18 AM

Quote:

So Linux 4.9 is out, and the merge window for 4.10 is thus open.

With the extra week for 4.9, the timing for the merge window is
obviously a bit awkward, and it technically closes in two weeks on
Christmas Day. But that is a pure technicality, because I will
certainly stop pulling on the 23rd at the latest, and if I get roped
into xmas food prep, even that date might be questionable.

I could extend the merge window rather than cut it short, but I'm not
going to. I suspect we all want a nice calm winter break, so if your
stuff isn't ready to be merged early, the solution is to just not
merge it yet at all, and wait for 4.11. Just so you all know (I
already bcc'd the main merge window suspects in a separate mailing
last week, I'm just repeating myself here to avoid anybody being
confused about timing).

Anyway, back to 4.9 itself.

I'm pretty sure this is the biggest release we've ever had, at least
in number of commits. If you look at the number of lines changed,
we've had bigger releases in the past, but they have tended to be due
to specific issues (v4.2 got a lot of lines from the AMD GPU register
definition files, for example, and we've had big re-organizations that
caused a lot of lines in the past: v3.2 was big due to staging, v3.7
had the automated uapi header file disintegration, etc). In contrast,
4.9 is just big.

Admittedly a chunk of that is the new greybus staging support, but
that really isn't the bulk of it - it's just another small detail in
the overall "yes, v4.9 is big" picture.

Other than just the size, 4.9 looks fairly normal. A bit over two
thirds drivers (staging, GPU and networking are the bulk of it, but
it's all over), with the rest looking fairly normal too: arch updates,
documentation, generic networking, filesystems..

The shortlog (16k+ commits, with another 1100 merge commits to round
things out) is obviously much too big to put here, and wouldn't be
legible anyway. So as is my wont, I'm appending just the log of my
merges.

Linus

More at LWN...

--jeremy