The restartable sequences feature is one of the stranger corners of the kernel's user-space interface; it provides a way for user space to carry out simple lockless operations and be informed if it is preempted over the course of an operation (and must, thus, restart). Work merged in the 6.19 release to improve the performance of restartable sequences broke the TCMalloc allocator, which was relying on an undocumented (and unintended) kernel behavior. Now, Olivier Dion is proposing an addition to the restartable-sequences API that will bring TCMalloc back into the fold; it does not make the restartable-sequences API any less strange, though.

The 7.3-rc2 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus said:

This didn't *feel* like a particularly busy rc2, but it clearly was. rc2 is usually the quietest time when people take a breather after the merge window and it takes a while to start finding bugs. But not this time - this is a "full fat" rc release. [...]

Nothing looks particularly odd, even if the rc2 timing is a bit unusual. It might be just random, but we'll obviously all blame it on AI, because whether that's really the cause or not, it's an easy thing to blame ;)