Torvalds releases version 2.6.22-rc1 of the Linux kernel

Linus Torvalds has announced the first release candidate for version 2.6.22 of the Linux kernel, noting that the changelog itself for this release is just too big to put on the mailing list.According to the kernel-meister
himself:

Ok, the merge window has closed, and 2.6.22-rc1 is out there.

The diffstat and shortlogs are way too big to fit under the kernel mailing list limits, and the changes are all over the place. Almost seven thousand files changed, and that’s not double-counting the files that got moved
around.

Architecture updates, drivers, filesystems, networking, security, build scripts, reorganizations, cleanups.. You name it, it’s there.

You want a new firewire stack? We’ve got it. New wireless networking infrastructure? Check. New infiniband drivers? Digital video drivers? A
totally new CPU architecture (blackfin)? Check, check, check.

That said, I think (and certainly hope) that this will not be nearly as painful as the big fundamental timer changes for 2.6.21, and while there
are some pretty core changes there (like the new SLUB allocator, which hopefully will end up replacing both SLAB and SLOB), it feels pretty
solid, and not as scary as ripping the carpet from under the timer infrastructure.

So give it a good testing. We’ll see how the regression tracking ends up working, but in order to actually track that, we want people actively
testing -rc1 and making good reports!