Date Sun, 12 Apr 2015 15:41:30 -0700 Subject Linux 4.0 released From Ima Sheep <> So I decided to release 4.0 as per the normal schedule, because there

really weren't any known issues, and while I'll be traveling during

the end of the upcoming week due to a college visit, I'm hoping that

won't affect the merge window very much. We'll see.



Linux 4.0 was a pretty small release both in linux-next and in final

size, although obviously "small" is all relative. It's still over 10k

non-merge commits. But we've definitely had bigger releases (and

judging by linux-next v4.1 is going to be one of the bigger ones).



Which is all good. It definitely matches the "v4.0 is supposed to be a

_stable_ release", and very much not about new experimental features

etc. I'm personally so much happier with time-based releases than the

bad old days when we had feature-based releases.



That said, there's a few interesting numerological things going on

with 4.0. Looking at just the statistics in git, this release is not

just when we cross half a million commits total, but also cross the 4

million git object limit. Interestingly (if you look for numeric

patterns), Linux 3.0 was when we crossed a quarter million commits and

2 million git objects, so there's a nice (and completely

unintentional) pattern there when it comes to the kernel git

repository.



[ Another quick historical numerological footnote: the old historical

BK tree was getting close to the 16-bit commilt limit that BK

originally used to have. So that whole "quarter of a million commits"

is actually quite a lot. During all of the BK years we only got 65k

commits. Of course, we only used BK for three years, and we've now

been on git for almost exactly ten years, but still - it shows how the

whole development process has really sped up a _lot_ ]



Feature-wise, 4.0 doesn't have all that much special. Much have been

made of the new kernel patching infrastructure, but realistically,

that not only wasn't the reason for the version number change, we've

had much bigger changes in other versions. So this is very much a

"solid code progress" release.



Go get it and enjoy,



Linus "we're all sheep" Torvalds





