So, there you have it, it'll be V4.0, not V 3.2. It seems Linus took a poll and participants wanted V4, even though he thought that Internet polls were bad, he went ahead with it.

Because the people have spoken, and while most of it was complete gibberish, numbers don't lie. People preferred 4.0, and 4.0 it shall be. Unless somebody can come up with a good argument against it.

On an actual technical side, this was a *fairly* small release. By modern standards, that is. It's certainly noticeably smaller than some recent kernels have been, although we're talking ~9k non-merge commits rather than 10-11k, so it's not like it's that huge of a difference.

The live patching infrastructure made some news, but my personal favorite features are actually some vm cleanups, where this release is getting rid of the largely unused non-linear remapping code (replaced with just emulating it with lots of smaller mappings) and unifies the NUMA and PROTNONE handling for page tables.

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1502.2/04059.html