Date Sun, 22 Feb 2015 19:06:40 -0800 Subject Linux 4.0-rc1 out.. From Linus Torvalds <> .. let's see how much, if anything, breaks due to the version number.

Probably less than during the 3.0 timeframe, but I can just imagine

somebody checking for meaningful versions.



Because the people have spoken, and while most of it was complete

gibberish, numbers don't lie. People preferred 4.0, and 4.0 it shall

be. Unless somebody can come up with a good argument against it.



So far, the arguments against it seem to have been "major numebr

should go with a major new feature or breaking of compatibility",

which just shows how little people know. We don't break compatibility,

and we haven't done feature-based releases since basically forever.



On the other hand, the strongest argument for some people advocating

4.0 seems to have been a wish to see 4.1.15 - because "that was the

version of Linux skynet used for the T-800 terminator".



So on the whole, I wouldn't read too much into the number.



On an actual technical side, this was a *fairly* small release. By

modern standards, that is. It's certainly noticeably smaller than some

recent kernels have been, although we're talking ~9k non-merge commits

rather than 10-11k, so it's not like it's that huge of a difference.



The live patching infrastructure made some news, but my personal

favorite features are actually some vm cleanups, where this release is

getting rid of the largely unused non-linear remapping code (replaced

with just emulating it with lots of smaller mappings) and unifies the

NUMA and PROTNONE handling for page tables.



But nobody should notice. Because moving to 4.0 does *not* mean that

we somehow changed what people see. It's all just more of the same,

just with smaller numbers so that I can do releases without having to

take off my socks again.



Go test it out. The git trees are already out, the tar-ball and

patches are going out as I write this. Of course, with the version

change, I suspect that there will be *some* hiccup with kernel.org

mirroring, even if Konstantin thinks that the scripts are all ready to

go.. So if you don't find tar-balls and patches, either I screwed up,

or Konstantin did ;)



Linus





