* Linus 7.4-rc1
@ 2026-11-01 22:08 Linus Torvalds
2026-11-02 14:51 ` Greg KH
0 siblings, 1 reply; 2+ messages in thread
From: Linus Torvalds @ 2026-11-01 22:08 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Linux Kernel Mailing List
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
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 2+ messages in thread* Re: Linus 7.4-rc1
2026-11-01 22:08 Linus 7.4-rc1 Linus Torvalds
@ 2026-11-02 14:51 ` Greg KH
0 siblings, 0 replies; 2+ messages in thread
From: Greg KH @ 2026-11-02 14:51 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Linus Torvalds; +Cc: Linux Kernel Mailing List
On Sun, Nov 01, 2026 at 02:08:46PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 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.
To be clear, I had assumed that 7.4 would be released the first week of
January if we had had a 3 week -rc1 cycle, so am planning on 7.3 to be
the next LTS kernel, which would have put the 7.4.0 release on the 27th
if everything had gone "well".
But now the scripts say:
current status: 7.4-rc1
---
7.4 window open : 2026-10-19
7.4 window close: 2026-11-01
7.4 rc1 : 2026-11-01 <-- you are here
7.4 final : 2026-12-20
---
That being said, if people are trying to "force" stuff into 7.4 that's
the best possible reason to NOT have it be the next LTS release as we
have had this happen in the past and suffered greatly for it.
So let's just count on 7.3.y to be the next LTS unless something really
crazy comes up with it that would prevent that from happening.
thanks,
greg k-h
>
> 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
>
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 2+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2026-11-02 14:51 UTC | newest]
Thread overview: 2+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
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2026-11-01 22:08 Linus 7.4-rc1 Linus Torvalds
2026-11-02 14:51 ` Greg KH
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