Linus Torvalds: Due to family reasons, I am still traveling, so this timing for rc3 is a bit unusual, but on the East Coast, it is now (almost) afternoon, so strictly speaking, the usual Sunday afternoon schedule still applies.
As expected, rc3 ended up being slightly larger than usual to balance the small rc2. Yes, 6.17 seems to be in good shape overall, but no one really believes that such a small rc2 would make it look that good.
While rc3 is on the larger side, it is by no means surprising; it is completely within normal parameters.
The diffstat also looks quite normal: about half of the drivers (spread across various areas, we got a bit of everything, but if you want to pick any specific area, the Mellanox mlx5 stands out). A significant portion added self-tests and some more Rust support, then randomly collected all the fixes: architecture code, filesystems, VM, and core networking.
Anyway, at this stage of the release cycle, things look quite normal, and there is nothing particularly special. Please continue testing.
Bug fixes for PCIe:
Nam Cao (3): selftests/coredump: Remove the read() that fails the test PCI: xilinx: Fix NULL pointer dereference in xilinx_pcie_intr_handler() PCI: vmd: Remove MSI-X check on child devicesEgg: Hahaha
Linus made a significant mistake in the email; the actual date is 2025.08.24, but the subject says
Linux 3.17-rc3, it should actually be Linux 6.17-rc3
