Kernel prepatch 7.4-rc2
Linus Torvalds has released the 7.4-rc2 prepatch and it will come as no surprise that it is a large one (" a big -rc2 to go with the largest ever…
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| Factor | Weight | Score | Contribution | Where it came from |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corroboration | 0.35 | 0.39 | +0.135 26% | 1 independent org on the story. Tier-3 aggregators never corroborate — they can show something is circulating, never that it is true. |
| Source trustleads | 0.25 | 0.85 | +0.212 40% | LWN is the highest-trust source on this story. Trust is taken from the best source, not averaged. |
| Pickup rate | 0.20 | 0.00 | +0.000 0% | One counted organisation, so there is no spread to measure — nothing has picked this up to set a rate. |
| Freshness | 0.20 | 0.91 | +0.183 34% | Halves every 10 hours from the newest item on the story. This is the only factor that rewards a story for nothing more than being recent. |
Corroboration counts distinct organisations, once each, and only from tiers 1 and 2. Freshness halves every 10 hours, so this ranking is a snapshot and will differ at the next build.
Software: Linux kernel developers Screenshot: VulcanSphere · GPLv2 · Wikimedia Commons · illustrativeKernel 7.4-rc2 has been released as a notably large prepatch, following an equally substantial -rc1. Automated code cleanup updates using Coccinelle tools account for much of the size increase, distributed across many files throughout the codebase. When these automated changes are excluded, the overall composition appears typical for this stage of development.
The remaining changes break down into three roughly equal portions: driver updates concentrated in GPU, networking, and sound subsystems; networking and BPF improvements; and miscellaneous updates spanning filesystems, memory management, and architecture code. A significant portion of fixes address AI-related issues across multiple areas.
On the BPF side specifically, maintainer Alexei Starovoitov reports that incoming fixes are now arriving faster than new bug reports are being filed. This suggests the subsystem may be reaching a more stable state as the release cycle progresses.
What happened
Linus Torvalds has released the 7.4-rc2 prepatch and it will come as no surprise that it is a large one (" a big -rc2 to go with the largest ever -rc1 "). 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: 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). And yes, much of this was driven by various AI fixes.
How this story arrived
Ordered by when each source was first observed, which is what the velocity figure is computed from. Publishers backdate; observed order does not.
- 01 Lwn first seen Kernel prepatch 7.4-rc2
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