Kernel release status

I'm not entirely happy about it - most of this is totally trivial stuff to random drivers, which obviously makes it all less scary, but at the same time I'm really not convinced the churn is worth it at rc5 time. These things are "fixes", sure, but at the same time a lot of them are simply so irrelevant that I think they'd be better off in a linux-next tree and get merged during the merge window.

So I think I'll start being a bit more hardnosed about this kind of unnecessary churn this late in the game. We are supposed to look for *regressions*. Non-critical fixes to long-standing issues are simply not appropriate for this late in the release cycle.

End result: this is too big, and this is the heads-up that I'll be pushing back on pointless pull requests with fixes that just aren't that important. And yes, several of these series were triggered by AI code review.

This release has seen 14,943 non-merge changesets from 2,320 developers, 459 of whom were first-time kernel contributors. The release history looks like:

RC	Date	Commits
v7.1-rc1	2026-04-26	13963	13963
v7.1-rc2	2026-05-03	475	475
v7.1-rc3	2026-05-10	584	584
v7.1-rc4	2026-05-17	428	428
v7.1-rc5	2026-05-24	748	748

See the LWN KSDB v7.1 page for a lot more details.

Stable updates: 7.0.10, 6.18.33, 6.12.91, 6.6.141, 6.1.174, 5.15.208, and 5.10.257 were all released on May 23.. The first four are huge (the 7.0.10 review version had 1,146 commits) while 6.1.174, 5.15.208, and 5.10.257 are small updates for the "Fragnesia" vulnerability.