Linus Torvalds has released the <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1106299/">7.4-rc2 prepatch</a> and it will come as no surprise that it is a large one ("<q>a big -rc2 to go with the largest ever -rc1</q>"). Much of the size was made up of some automated Coccinelle updates that were spread out all over the tree; once those are factored out, the rest looks fairly normal: <blockquote class="bq"> When masking that noise out from the diffstat, the shape of it changes - not spread out over thousands of files any more. But it does not look unusual: a third is drivers (gpu, networking and sound account for most of it, but there's a bit of everything), another third is networking and bpf, and the final third is "the rest" (mostly filesystems, mm, arch updates). <p> And yes, much of this was driven by various AI fixes. I think I'll stop repeating that, and we can just take it for granted. But this time around Alexei [Starovoitov] claims that on the bpf side at least the fixes are now coming in faster than the new reports, and that sounds lovely if true. </blockquote>
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