Ok,
tons of patches merged, with me being away for a week, and also the
normal pent-up patch demand after any stable kernel. Special thanks as
always to Andrew, who synced up 200+ patches (he's attributed in the
sign-off lines, but not in the appended shortlog, so I just wanted to
point that out).
Changes all over: arm, ppc, sparc, acpi, i2c, usb, fbcon, ntfs, xfs, nfs,
cpufreq, agp, sata, network drivers - you name it. Most of the changes are
fairly small, but there's a lot of them.
Administrative trivia, and one thing I agonized over: should I make the
patches relative to 2.6.8 or 2.6.8.1? I decided that since there is
nothing that says that a "basic bug-fix" releases for a previous release
might not happen _after_ we've done a -rc release for the next version, I
can't sanely do patches against a bugfix release.
Thus the 2.6.9-rc1 patch is against plain 2.6.8. If you have 2.6.8.1, you
need to undo the .1 patch, and apply the big one. BK users and tar-balls don't see that particular confusion, of course ;)