Linus Torvalds: Linux 6.9-rc1

So two weeks have passed, the merge window is over, and v6.9-rc1 is
tagged and pushed out.

This merge window looks to be fairly normal. If you look at the diffs,
you'd think that the bulk of all the changes are AMD GPU header files
again, and you'd not be entirely wrong. About 40% of the whole 6.9rc1
patch is indeed just the auto-generated AMD GPU definitions. I wish
this was unusual, but it's a pattern.

Anyway, while that is a lot of the actual changes by pure line
numbers, it's all just basically noise and not meaningful in the big
picture.

In contrast, what _is_ meaningful is a couple of very core updates.
The timer subsystem had a fairly big rewrite, to have per-cpu timer
wheels to improve performance of timers, which can be a big deal
particularly for networking. The other fairly notable core update is
to the workqueue subsystem, where one notable addition is for BH
workqueue support. That's notable mainly because it means we finally
have a way away from tasklets. The tasklet interface has basically
been deprecated for a long while, but we've never really had any good
alternatives (with threaded interrupt handlers being one suggested
use-case, but not realistic in many cases).

The core updates should be entirely invisible to users, as they don't
involve any semantic changes, just expanded capabilities. Of course,
being somewhat big changes, they did cause a few issues, but we've
hopefully already caught all the big deals.

Anyway, there's obviously also all the usual updates, and even when
you ignore the recurring AMD header drop more than half of actual
patch is - as usual - various driver updates all over. And all the
other usual suspects: architecture updates, various filesystems (old
ntfs core removal might be worth noting), core networking, VM and
kernel. And tooling and documentation.

Please commence testing,

           Linus