Linux 2.6.27-rc2

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Wed Aug 06 2008 - 01:15:22 EST



So it's been a week since -rc1, and -rc2 is out there.

There's a lot of random changes in there, and I'm hoping we're starting to
calm down, but one particular _kind_ of random change is probably worth
pointing out explicitly due to the things it can result in: the fact that
a number of architectures ended up using the "lull" after -rc1 (hah!) to
do the 'include/asm-xyz' => 'arch/xyz/include/asm' renames.

Now, that doesn't really matter for 99% of all people, but the very fact
that there are a _lot_ of renames here (and more pending) can affect
people who depend on git to do rename detection and merging of contents
across renames.

So _if_ you use git to merge stuff, be aware that we've recently had more
renames than the rename detection limit in git defaults to, and as a
result, if you have a rename<->data change conflict, you may want to
increase the default limit. Just add a

[diff]
renamelimit=0

to your ~/.gitconfig to disable the limit entirely if you have lots of
memory (or make it some high value like 5000 or something). The default
limit is pretty low just to not cause problems for people who have less
memory in their machines than kernel developers tend to have...

(Of course, you can just decide to do the merge resolution manually, but
most people would prefer not to).

NOTE! For people who don't actually do development in git, and just use it
to track the kernel tree by just updating from the same source all the
time, this won't matter - you're not doing any merges, you're just fast-
forwarding all the time and rename detection is immaterial since there can
never be any conflicts to resolve.

Anyway, for somewhat the same reason, the diffstat isn't very readable.
Even with rename detection enabled, there's a thousand lines of just
things like

rename {include/asm-sh/cpu-sh2 => arch/sh/include/cpu-sh2/cpu}/cache.h (88%)

etc (and obviously doing it _without_ rename detection is even less
useful).

The dirstat (with rename detection on, so as to not show the movement as
huge changes) is fairly usual, with most of the changes in drivers, along
with an ext4 and xfs update making 'fs' show up pretty high too:

3.9% Documentation/
3.5% arch/mips/kernel/
8.9% arch/mips/
8.9% arch/
4.0% arch/sh/
4.1% arch/
13.0% drivers/misc/sgi-gru/
19.6% drivers/misc/sgi-xp/
32.7% drivers/misc/
4.2% drivers/net/wireless/
7.6% drivers/net/
5.8% drivers/regulator/
56.7% drivers/
8.6% fs/xfs/
11.1% fs/
6.5% include/

The shortlog is still a tad too big to make it on the list (again, as
usual - normally I end up posting shortlogs for -rc3 and later when they
become more manageable) but let me just say that it isn't really all that
interesting. Theres' a lot of small changes here, but nothing that makes
you go "Wow!". Not that there _should_ be anything like that in -rc2, of
course, so I'm not complaining.

Linus
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