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Linux 4.7rc-1 shipped

The Linux 4.7rc-1 release process went so smoothly this time that Linus Torvalds slipped the code out early and complained about … his boring life.

Pushing the release out ahead of time, because things went smoothly and it was “a fine merge window”, Boring Linus writes: “This time, to spice things up, I decided to just release on Sunday morning instead.

“[And yes, before you ask , my life really is boring if this is 'spicing things up']”.

The change Torvalds picks out as the big one is a revision in the Virtual File System (VFS).

Under Linux 4.7-rc1, VFS now “allows filesystems (if they buy into it) to do readdir() and path component lookup in parallel within the same directory”, he writes.

“That's probably the biggest conceptual vfs change we've had since we started doing cached pathname lookups using RCU.”

In terms of the amount of code for that change, “none of the filesystem updates even show up on the default 'dirstat' statistics”, Linus the Boring writes.

Apart from that, he says, driver updates dominate the revised code. ®

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