Linus Torvalds: Linux 6.0-rc1

So here we are, two weeks later, and the merge window has closed.

People are chasing down one active bug, and I'm sure there are others
hiding that just need more people to do testing, but that's kind of
the point of rc1: all the big changes have been merged, and now we
need to calm it down and chase down any problems.

Despite the major number change, there's nothing fundamentally
different about this release - I've long eschewed the notion that
major numbers are meaningful, and the only reason for a "hierarchical"
numbering system is to make the numbers easier to remember and
distinguish. Which is why when the minor number gets to around 20 I
prefer to just increment the major number instead and reset to
something smaller.

"Nothing fundamentally different about this release" obviously doesn't
mean there aren't lots of changes, though. There's about 13.5k
non-merge commits in here (and 800+ merges), so 6.0 looks to be
another fairly sizable release.

I actually was hoping that we'd get some of the first rust
infrastructure, and the multi-gen LRU VM, but neither of them happened
this time around. There's always more releases. But there's a lot of
continued development pretty much all over the place, with the
"shortlog" being much too long to post and thus - as always for rc1
notices - below only contains my "merge log". You can definitely get a
kind of high-level overview by just scanning that, but obviously it's
worth once again pointing out that the people mentioned in the merge
log are just the maintainers I pull from, and there's more than 1700
developers involved when you start looking at the full details in the
git tree.

And, once again, this is one of those releases where you should not
look at the diffstat too closely, because more than half of it is yet
another AMD GPU register dump. And the Habanalabs Gaudi2 people want
to play in that space too, but they don't reach quite the same lofty
results that the AMD GPU people  have become so famous for. I'm sure
it's just a matter of time.

The CPU people also show up in the JSON files that describe the perf
events, but they look absolutely tiny compared to the 'asic_reg'
auto-generated GPU and AI hardware definitions.

So just avert your eyes from those parts if you decide that you
actually want to look at the diffs themselves. Once you do that, the
stats look pretty normal, with roughly 60% driver updates (all over,
but gpu, networking and sound are the big updates - again, that's
pretty much par for the course). The rest is a mix of arch updates,
filesystems, tooling, and just random changes all over.

In all its glory (so all those AMD GPU hardware definitions etc included), it's

 13099 files changed, 1280295 insertions(+), 341210 deletions(-)

just because I was curious and looked.

Oh, and after I had already decided to call this kernel 6.0, a few
Chinese developers piped up and pointed out that "5.20" is a more
wholesome version of the Western "4.20" internet-famous number. So if
you want to call this "Linux 5.20", go right ahead. Because the kernel
version  numbers really are entirely made up and have no intrinsic
meaning.

But whatever you call it, please help test this, so that we can get it
all in shape for the final release (hopefully early October).

                 Linus