[$] The rest of the 5.0 merge window
Linus Torvalds released 5.0-rc1 on
January 6, closing the merge window for this development cycle and
confirming that the next release will indeed be called "5.0". At that
point, 10,843 non-merge change sets had been pulled into the mainline, about
2,100 since last week's summary was
written. Those
2,100 patches included a number of significant changes, though, including
some new
system-call semantics that may yet prove to create problems for existing
user-space code.