KERNEL WATCH
Jon Masters summarises the latest happenings in the Linux kernel, because someone has to.
L inus Torvalds announced Linux 5.15-rc1 (Release Candidate 1), noting that at just over 10,000 non-merge (non-administrative) commits, it is “in fact the smallest rc1 we have had in the 5.x series. We’re usually hovering in the 12-14k commit range”. He called out the new (writable) support for NTFSv3, as well as support for an in-kernel SMB (Windows network filesystem) driver that aims to play nice with the userspace Samba project and its utilities.
With the release of “-rc1” came the requisite closing of the “merge window” (period of time during which disruptive changes are allowed into the kernel) which had been “one of the messier merge windows”. As Linus says, “Part of it was selfinflicted damage from me trying to enable -Werror much more aggressively”. What he had done was attempt to enforce that all code warnings seen by the compiler would be treated as build-terminating error conditions.