Linus Torvalds: Linux 5.17-r8

So last weekend, I thought I'd be releasing the final 5.17 today.

That was then, this is now. Last week was somewhat messy, mostly
because of embargoed patches we had pending with another variation of
spectre attacks.  And while the patches were mostly fine, we had the
usual "because it was hidden, all our normal testing automation didn't
see it either".

And once the automation sees things, it tests all the insane
combinations that people don't tend to actually use or test in any
normal case, and so there was a (small) flurry of fixes for the fixes.

None of this was really surprising, but I naïvely thought I'd be able
to do the final release this weekend anyway.

And honestly, I considered it. I don't think we really have any
pending issues that would hold up a release, but on the other hand we
also really don't have any reason _not_ to give it another week with
all the proper automated testing.  So that's what I'm doing, and as a
result we have an -rc8 release today instead of doing a final 5.17.

There's a number of non-spectre things in here too, of course. Among
other things, people finally chased down a couple of mislaid patches
that had been on the regression list, so hopefully we have those all
nailed down now too.

And obviously there's all the usual random fixes in here too. But
because of the spectre thing, about half of the -rc8 patch is
architecture updates.

That said, it's still a fairly _small_ half of the patch. It was not
one of the "big disaster" hw speculation things, it was mostly
extending existing mitigations and reporting.

Anyway, let's not keep the testing _just_ to automation - the more the
merrier, and real-life loads are always more interesting than what the
automation farms do. So please do give this last rc a quick try,

                    Linus