Hmm. The 5.10 release candidates stubbornly keeps staying fairly big,
even though by rc5 we really should be seeing things starting to calm
down and shrink.

There's nothing in here that makes me particularly nervous, but in
pure numbers of commits, this is the largest rc5 we've had in the 5.x
series. Number of diff lines too, for that matter. And I can't even
claim that it's because previous rc's have been small and missing
stuff and we were just catching up.

Anyway, changes all over, and apart from it being a bit more than I'd
like, it all looks fairly normal. About half of the patch is drivers,
with the rest being fairly evenly spread out all over - architecture
fixes, filesystems, networking, self tests..

We'll have to see how this release shapes up, but I'm still hopeful
for things to calm down.   Otherwise we get into uncomfortable
territory for the next release with the holiday season coming up too.

So go forth and test,

             Linus

Linux 5.10-rc4 last weekend was still rather heavy on changes but this evening now brings Linux 5.10-rc5 and unfortunately the situation has not improved...

With Linux 5.10-rc5 it's more bug fixing as usual for getting into the late stage of the cycle. But there are some additional changes this week to also note: AMD "Arcturus" GPU support is no longer experimental and the first product launched in the form of the AMD Instinct MI100, there is a regression fix for stress-ng that was causing as much as a 70% drop, and the POWER9 L1d cache flushing security change is in place for Linux 5.10 as well as the stable Linux series.

The 5.10-rc5 kernel prepatch is out. "The 5.10 release candidates stubbornly keeps staying fairly big, even though by rc5 we really should be seeing things starting to calm down and shrink. There's nothing in here that makes me particularly nervous, but in pure numbers of commits, this is the largest rc5 we've had in the 5.x series."