El Reg has noted:
Torvalds looses neatened number [release featuring] non-disruptive patches, Z13 support, and more.
[...] The new number isn't a sign of a major upgrade. As we've chronicled, Torvalds thinks that it looks a bit silly when version numbers go beyond x.19.
As the Benevolent Dictator for Life says in his post at the kernel mailing list:
since rc7 [...] It's mainly driver fixes (media, sound, pci, scsi target, drm, thermal..), misc arch updates (nios2 and x86), and scattered fixes elsewhere. Really not a lot during the last week.
After you folks hammered on the 7 release candidates and gave the kernel team bug reports, any drama seems to have been wrung out.
We previously discussed the never-need-to-reboot patching feature that has now been incorporated into the kernel.
(Score: 1) by draconx on Monday April 13 2015, @08:55PM
Since 3.0 was ~4 years ago, we don't need to worry about that for another 60 years or so. Since Mr. Torvalds will most likely be dead by then it won't be an issue.