Linux has finally made the jump to 3.0. The move is not an Earth-shattering one. A few months back, Linus Torvalds suggested it was time to move the version numbers forward, if only to fix the fact that the term "2.6 kernel" had effectively become meaningless. I'll post in the message Linus sent to the Linux kernel mailing list, sans code. The original post includes the list or recent changes to the kernel. The 3.0 insinuates that this was a big break, but in reality, it's a fairly standard update.

So there it is. Gone are the 2.6.bignum

days, and 3.0 is out.

This obviously also opens the merge window for the next kernel, which will be 3.1. The stable team will take the third digit, so 3.0.1 will be the first stable release based on 3.0.

As already mentioned several times, there are no special landmark features or incompatibilities related to the version number change, it's simply a way to drop an inconvenient numbering system in honor of twenty years of Linux. In fact, the 3.0 merge window was calmer than most, and apart from some excitement from RCU I'd have called it really smooth. Which is not to say that there may not be bugs, but if anything, there are hopefully fewer than usual, rather than the normal ".0" problems.

And as I already mentioned yesterday, I'm hoping the 3.1 merge window will be calm too, because due to the delays the latter half of the merge window will fall into my vacation time. I briefly considered simply waiting two extra weeks, but quite frankly, that wouldn't really have solved anything (it would have made the merge window instead fall into LinuxCon and my divemaster weekends).

So I'm going to try to keep to the normal two-week merge window, but if it ends up being too busy for me to keep up, I may end up extending the window just so that I can merge everything. However, even if that happens, that will *not* mean that I will accept big pull requests for longer, it just means that I may end up delaying things to catch up with timely merge requests.

That said, judging by past experience, the summer merge windows often tend to be quieter, so maybe I worry needlessly. Much of Europe is starting to go on vacation, and parts of the US are being fried to a crisp, so maybe 3.1 will be calm too.

Anyway, what has changed since -rc7 is mainly some RCU interactions with the scheduler, and the RCU problems should hopefully be behind us. The pathname lookup race is also fixed. There's a few DRI fixes (i915 modesetting, and some Radeon fixes), and Al walked through some more esoteric VFS d_lock issues. Other than that it's really pretty small and random.

The shortlog from -rc7 is appended, the bigger "everything since 2.6.39" list is obviously unmanageable.

Linus