3.18 Merge window part 3

Last week's merge window summary made the bold prediction that the 3.18 merge window might end earlier than expected; sure enough, Linus released 3.18-rc1 on October 19, one week ahead of the original plan. In the end, 9,711 non-merge changesets found their way into Linus's repository prior to the 3.18-rc1 release; roughly 200 more have been pulled since (as of this writing). Linus made it clear that he would be more open than usual to the addition of features after -rc1 since some developers may have been counting on the original timeline; indeed, a few features have gone in since.

User-visible changes merged since last week's summary include:

• The Rados block device has gained support for discard requests.

• New hardware support includes:
  • Input: Microchip AR1021 i2c touchscreens.

  • Miscellaneous: Maxim MAX77836 battery chargers, Ricoh RN5T5618 power-management ICs (PMICs), Rockchip RK808 PMICs, HiSilicon Hi6421 PMICs, Qualcomm SPMI PMICs, Maxim 77802 PMIC clocks, Axxia I2C controllers, and Hisilicon Hix5hd2 high-speed I2C controllers.

  • Watchdog: Cadence watchdog timers, Qualcomm MSM8960, APQ8064, and IPQ8064 watchdog timers, Ricoh RN5T618 watchdog timers, Dialog DA9063 watchdog timers, and Amlogic Meson SoC watchdog timers.

Changes visible to kernel developers include:

• Work continues to support the building of the kernel with the LLVM compiler. In particular, the use of variable-length arrays in structures is nonstandard and not supported by LLVM, so these uses need to be deleted from kernel code. There is a new macro, SHASH_DESC_ON_STACK() (declared in this commit) that has been used to replace these arrays.

• A number of per-CPU variable functions have been deprecated; these include __get_cpu_var() (use this_cpu_ptr() instead) and __this_cpu_ptr() (replaced by raw_cpu_ptr()).

• There is a new "mailbox" framework for hardware-based interprocessor communication mechanisms. See Documentation/mailbox.txt for (some) more information.

At this point the stabilization process begins in earnest. If the usual schedule holds, the final 3.18 kernel can be expected sometime around the beginning of December.

Index entries for this article
Kernel	Releases/3.18

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