The latest linux 4.10-rc2 build nearly didn't happen because L-triptophaniac developers were Christmassing, but Linux Torvalds decided to set it free as a New Year treat.
Explaining the build, Torvalds wrote that “rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody”.
DAX (direct access for files, which reads from and writes to storage directly) drivers got the most work, with fixes from Jan Kara. Torvalds describes the rest as “trivial small fixes”.
Since it's less than a month since the production version of Linux 4.9 landed, there's still plenty of time for the devs to catch up with the graphics, processor support, and broader laptop and mobile targets planned for 4.10.
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