The end of the 4.7 merge window
By the time that Linus released the 4.7-rc1
prepatch and closed the merge window for this development cycle, 10,707
non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline repository. As
expected, that falls rather short of the 12,172 pulled for 4.6-rc1, but it
still adds up to a busy development cycle with a number of interesting
changes and new features.
Some of the changes pulled since last week's summary are:
- The NFS client now implements the copy_file_range() system call,
making use of the NFS 4.2 COPY command to optimize the
operation on the remote server.
- The direct-access code for persistent memory (DAX) can now work with
memory arrays containing media errors.
- If the new TRIM_UNUSED_KSYMS configuration option is
selected, any exported symbols that are not actually used by the built
kernel will be removed from the exports list. That might open up more
optimization opportunities, and making unused symbols inaccessible
seems like a worthwhile change from a security point of view.
- A number of longstanding issues with the kernel's string-hashing code,
described in this article, have been
addressed through the introduction of a new hashing library. See <linux/stringhash.h> for
the new interface.
- New hardware support includes: Sigma Designs "Tango" temperature sensors, thermal sensors attached to analog-to-digital converters, Intel Core SoC power management controllers, Chelsio iSCSI target offload controllers, Texas Instruments TAS5720 mono audio amplifiers, and Maxim MAX98371 codecs.
If the normal schedule is followed, the 4.7 release can be expected to
happen on July 17. There are no guarantees, of course; that date can
be shifted by regressions, unexpected API issues, or irresistible diving
opportunities. But the release cycle is predictable enough these days that
we can expect that date to not slip by much, if at all. Between now and
then, it's just a matter of testing the new kernel and getting the
inevitable bugs fixed.
| Index entries for this article | |
|---|---|
| Kernel | Releases/4.7 |