Date Sun, 12 Apr 2015 15:41:30 -0700
Subject Linux 4.0 released
From Ima Sheep <>

So I decided to release 4.0 as per the normal schedule, because there really weren’t any known issues, and while I’ll be traveling during the end of the upcoming week due to a college visit, I’m hoping that won’t affect the merge window very much. We’ll see.

Linux 4.0 was a pretty small release both in linux-next and in final size, although obviously “small” is all relative. It’s still over 10k non-merge commits. But we’ve definitely had bigger releases (and judging by linux-next v4.1 is going to be one of the bigger ones).

Which is all good. It definitely matches the “v4.0 is supposed to be a_stable_ release”, and very much not about new experimental features etc. I’m personally so much happier with time-based releases than the bad old days when we had feature-based releases.

That said, there’s a few interesting numerological things going on with 4.0. Looking at just the statistics in git, this release is not just when we cross half a million commits total, but also cross the 4 million git object limit. Interestingly (if you look for numeric patterns), Linux 3.0 was when we crossed a quarter million commits and 2 million git objects, so there’s a nice (and completely unintentional) pattern there when it comes to the kernel git repository.

[ Another quick historical numerological footnote: the old historical BK tree was getting close to the 16-bit commilt limit that BK originally used to have. So that whole “quarter of a million commits” is actually quite a lot. During all of the BK years we only got 65k commits. Of course, we only used BK for three years, and we’ve now been on git for almost exactly ten years, but still – it shows how the whole development process has really sped up a _lot_ ]

Feature-wise, 4.0 doesn’t have all that much special. Much have been made of the new kernel patching infrastructure, but realistically, that not only wasn’t the reason for the version number change, we’ve had much bigger changes in other versions. So this is very much a “solid code progress” release.

Go get it and enjoy,

Linus “we’re all sheep” Torvalds