Linus 7.4-rc1

[Linus Torvalds]

It's Sunday afternoon, two weeks have passed, and I've pushed out -rc1.

I still have two pull requests in my inbox that I'm still thinking
about, but I didn't want to delay -rc1 just because I'm vacillating,
so they may or may not end up showing up in rc2.

This is a *BIG* merge window. I think the reason is the by now obvious
one, but I'm actually taking it as a good sign: I'm *much* happier
with the flood of AI triggered work going into the merge window than
it showing up mainly as extra fixes during the -rc period. So I'm
hoping that this merge window being larger than usual is a sign that
the AI fixes are becoming more part of the "normal development" than a
flood of fixes that go into the whole stabilization phase. I think
that's a much healthier model. But we'll see how the -rc's look.

That said, a small part of the "this is a big merge window" may also
be that people are expecting 7.4 to be the next LTS release, which is
another independent reason why some releases tend larger than others.
So it may not *just* be the flood of AI patches.

Whatever the reason(s) for a big release, it's huge both in commits -
almost 20k commits vs the more common ~15k - and as a diff. Although
the diff is large partly for the other traditional reason: yet another
AMD hardware register dump into huge headers. A full third of the
patch is just AMD GPU register offsets and bit masks. We've been here
before, and I'm sure we'll see it many times again in the future. Just
ignore the noise.

And if you *do* ignore that noise, it all looks fairly normal. Large,
and full of fixes for issues found by AI (and more and more the
patches have been suggested by AI too, although they often get
rewritten). But not otherwise looking very strange. About half drivers
(again, ignoring the AMD GPU headers - if you don't, it's more like
2/3rds drivers), with the rest being spread all over, and in the usual
places. Architecrture updates, filesystems (both core vfs layer and
individual low-level filesystems), tooling (mainly perf, and also a
lot of selftest updates). and core kernel (networking, rust, bpf, mm:
a little bit of everything).

And even more than usual, you don't want to see the shortlog. Being a
large merge window means that just the "shortlog" is 24k lines and
1.2MB total. So below is my usual merge summary, which will act as a
kind of high-level overview of the areas that have changed. You'll
need to get the git tree for full details (or more likely, to then
look at the particular areas you are interested in).

                  Linus

---

Alex Williamson (1):
    VFIO updates

Alexandre Belloni (2):
    I3C updates
    RTC updates

Alexei Starovoitov (2):
    bpf updates
    bpf fixes

Alison Schofield (1):
    NVDIMM and DAX updates

Amir Goldstein (1):
    overlayfs fixes

Andi Shyti (2):
    i2c updates
    more i2c updates

Andreas Gruenbacher (1):
    gfs2 updates

Andrew Morton (3):
    MM updates
    non-MM updates
    more MM updates

Andy Shevchenko (1):
    auxdisplay updates

Anna Schumaker (1):
    nfs client updates

Ard Biesheuvel (1):
    EFI updates

Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo (1):
    perf tool updates

Arnd Bergmann (4):
    SoC devicetree updates
    SoC driver updates
    SoC defconfig updates
    ARM SoC board file updates

Bartosz Golaszewski (3):
    power sequencing updates
    gpio updates
    gpio fixes

Bjorn Andersson (2):
    remoteproc updates
    rpmsg updates

Bjorn Helgaas (1):
    PCI updates

Borislav Petkov (10):
    EDAC updates
    x86 asm update
    x86 CPU speculation updates
    x86 resource control updates
    x86 cleanups
    x86 cpu feature updates
    x86 FPU state updates
    x86 platform updates
    x86 SEV updates
    x86 boot updates

Breno Leitao (1):
    configfs updates

Carlos Maiolino (1):
    xfs updates

Catalin Marinas (2):
    arm64 updates
    arm64 fixes

Christian Brauner (21):
    ipc fix
    namespace updates
    signal handling updates
    bfs removal
    buffer_head updates
    binfmt updates
    close_range updates
    coredump updates
    file table updates
    vfs idmap constification
    iomap updates
    kernfs updates
    path lookup updates
    misc vfs updates
    mount updates
    netfs updates
    pidfd updates
    superblock updates
    file closing updates
    vfs keyring updates
    vfs fixes

Chuck Lever (1):
    nfsd updates

Daniel Thompson (1):
    kgdb updates

Danilo Krummrich (3):
    driver core updates
    driver core fixes
    more driver core fixes

Dave Airlie (2):
    drm updates
    drm fixes

Dave Hansen (4):
    x86 kdump update
    x86 microcode loader update
    x86 mm updates
    x86 TDX updates

Dave Jiang (1):
    CXL updates

David Hildenbrand (1):
    core memory management updates

David Sterba (3):
    btrfs updates
    affs updates
    more btrfs updates

David Teigland (1):
    dlm updates

Dinh Nguyen (1):
    NIOS2 update

Dipen Patel (1):
    hte updates

Dmitry Torokhov (1):
    input updates

Eric Biggers (5):
    crypto library updates
    fscrypt updates
    fsverity updates
    fscrypt fixes
    fsverity fixes

Fan Wu (1):
    IPE updates

Frederic Weisbecker (1):
    kthread fix

Gao Xiang (2):
    erofs updates
    erofs fixes

Geert Uytterhoeven (1):
    m68k updates

Greg KH (4):
    staging driver updates
    tty / serial driver updates
    USB / Thunderbolt update
    Char/Misc/IIO/others driver updates

Greg Ungerer (1):
    m68knommu updates

Guenter Roeck (2):
    watchdog updates
    hwmon updates

Harry Yoo (1):
    slab updates

Heiko Carstens (1):
    s390 updates

Helge Deller (3):
    fbdev updates
    parisc updates
    more fbdev updates

Herbert Xu (1):
    crypto updates

Huacai Chen (1):
    LoongArch updates

Ilpo Järvinen (1):
    x86 platform driver updates

Ilya Dryomov (1):
    ceph updates

Ingo Molnar (12):
    scheduler updates
    locking updates
    objtool updates
    perf events updates
    kexec / irq fix
    perf events fixes
    scheduler fixes
    timer fixes
    x86 fix
    misc irqchip fixes
    timer fixes
    scheduler fix

Jaegeuk Kim (1):
    f2fs updates

Jakub Kicinski (1):
    networking fixes

James Bottomley (2):
    SCSI updates
    more SCSI updates

Jan Kara (2):
    fsnotify updates
    ext2, isofs, udf and quota updates

Jarkko Sakkinen (2):
    keys updates
    TPM updates

Jason Gunthorpe (4):
    TSM update
    iommufd updates
    rdma updates
    fwctl update

Jassi Brar (1):
    mailbox updates

Jens Axboe (5):
    io_uring updates
    block updates
    io_uring dma-buf support
    io_uring fixes
    more block updates

Jiri Kosina (1):
    HID updates

Joel Granados (1):
    sysctl updates

Joerg Roedel (1):
    IOMMU updates

Johannes Berg (1):
    UML updates

John Johansen (1):
    AppArmor fixes

John Paul Adrian Glaubitz (1):
    sh updates

Jonathan Corbet (2):
    documentation updates
    more documentation updates

Juergen Gross (1):
    xen updates

Kees Cook (3):
    pstore updates
    seccomp updates
    hardening updates

Konstantin Komarov (1):
    ntfs3 updates

Lee Jones (3):
    MFD updates
    LED updates
    backlight updates

Len Brown (1):
    x86 power utilities updates

Linus Walleij (1):
    pin control updates

Madhavan Srinivasan (1):
    powerpc updates

Magnus Lindholm (1):
    alpha updates

Marco Elver (1):
    KCSAN updates

Marek Szyprowski (1):
    dma-mapping updates

Mark Brown (6):
    regulator updates
    spi updates
    regmap updates
    regmap fix
    regulator fix
    spi fixes

Masami Hiramatsu (3):
    probes updates
    bootconfig updates
    bootconfig fix

Matt Turner (1):
    alpha floating point emulation fix

Mauro Carvalho Chehab (2):
    media updates
    media update

Max Filippov (1):
    xtensa updates

Michael Tsirkin (1):
    vhost,virtio updates

Michal Simek (1):
    arch/microblaze updates

Mickaël Salaün (1):
    Landlock update

Miguel Ojeda (2):
    Rust updates
    Rust fixes

Mike Marshall (1):
    orangefs updates

Mike Rapoport (3):
    memblock updates
    kexec updates
    liveupdate updates

Miklos Szeredi (1):
    fuse updates

Mikulas Patocka (1):
    device mapper updates

Mimi Zohar (1):
    IMA updates

Miquel Raynal (1):
    MTD updates

Namjae Jeon (4):
    smb server updates
    exfat updates
    ntfs updates
    smb server fixes

Nathan Chancellor (2):
    Kbuild / Kconfig updates
    Kbuild fixes

Niklas Cassel (1):
    ata updates

Paolo Abeni (1):
    networking updates

Paolo Bonzini (2):
    KVM updates
    more KVM updates

Paul McKenney (3):
    two-byte cmpxchg emulation
    RCU updates
    CSD lock updates

Paul Moore (3):
    audit updates
    selinux updates
    lsm updates

Paul Walmsley (1):
    RISC-V updates

Paulo Alcantara (2):
    smb client updates
    smb client fixes

Petr Mladek (2):
    printk updates
    livepatching updates

Petr Pavlu (1):
    module updates

Rafael Wysocki (6):
    ACPI support updates
    power management updates
    thermal control updates
    ACPI support fixes
    power management fixes
    thermal control fixes

Rob Herring (1):
    devicetree updates

Russell King (1):
    ARM updates

Sebastian Reichel (1):
    power supply and reset updates

Shuah Khan (2):
    kselftest updates
    kunit update

Stephen Boyd (1):
    clk updates

Steven Rostedt (6):
    runtime verifier updates
    RTLA tooling updates
    ftrace updates
    ring-buffer updates
    tracing updates
    ktest updates

Takashi Iwai (2):
    sound updates
    sound fixes

Takashi Sakamoto (1):
    firewire updates

Ted Ts'o (1):
    ext4 updates

Tejun Heo (5):
    workqueue updates
    cgroup updates
    sched_ext updates
    cgroup fixes
    sched_ext fixes

Thomas Bogendoerfer (1):
    MIPS updates

Thomas Gleixner (6):
    irq updates
    irq chip driver updates
    clocksource updates
    timer core updates
    NOHZ updates
    VDSO updates

Thomas Weißschuh (1):
    nolibc updates

Tzung-Bi Shih (2):
    chrome platform updates
    chrome platform firmware loader updates

Ulf Hansson (2):
    MMC updates
    pmdomain updates

Uwe Kleine-König (1):
    pwm updates

Viacheslav Dubeyko (2):
    nilfs2 updates
    hfs/hfsplus updates

Vinod Koul (3):
    soundwire updates
    phy updates
    dmaengine updates

Wei Liu (1):
    hyperv updates

Yury Norov (1):
    bitmap updates