Next btrfs development cycle open - 5.4

From: David Sterba <[email protected]>

Hi,

a friendly reminder of the timetable and what's expected at this phase.

5.1 - current
5.2 - upcoming, urgent regression fixes only
5.3 - development closed, pull request in prep, fixes or regressions only 5.4 - development open, until 5.3-rc5 (at least)

(https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Developer%27s_FAQ#Development_schedule)

Current status
--------------

I've forked the misc-next branch to 5.3 from the point where I did enough testing, there are more patches coming from misc-next still.

There are some strange problems still hit on testing machines so at this point I don't want to add more patches until we know what's the cause and we have the fixes ready.

Hilights of 5.3 changes
------------------------

Not much this time, there's majority of cleanups, refactoring and preparatory patches. The raid1c34 feature is postponed as replace of missing device(s) does not work as expected. More hash algorithms need the real evaluation, other feature patchsets don't seem to be near-merge either due to lack of reviews or more work required.

Git development repos
---------------------

k.org: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/kdave/linux.git
devel1: https://gitlab.com/kdave/btrfs-devel
devel2: https://github.com/kdave/btrfs-devel

Usual points
------------

* the current patch queue (as is in misc-next) looks stable, so no big changes are going to be applied at this time. The usual exceptions are bugfixes or obvious cleanups.

* the base of the patches should be the last announced pull request, which is going to be named 'for-5.3' in my k.org tree. Reviewed patches will be collected in a branch that's usually named 'misc-next' in my devel git repos and is part of the for-next at k.org git repo.

* merging of new patches to misc-next will be slow during the merge window

* review other developer patches, test them, find bugs before they are in a released kernel