Hey all,

So it's release day and I've put up v2018.11-rc1. The merge window is now closed and I've updated git and the tarballs are also up now.

Looking back to v2018.09, I had hoped to include the entire SPI-NAND series in that release. We're not there quite yet, but I expect a final PR shortly for that work and then we will be.

As part of dealing with Hurricane Florence I let my queue get a bit longer than I had hoped, and I still need to clean that out and bring in a few more series that are most likely ready to go at this point.

Having asked before for more signed tags, I'm quite glad to see more happening. Please note that if you can't make the tags work yet, a summary in the email itself is still something I can copy/paste in to my merge.

In that vein, so far this release we have (including but not limited to): - FPGA improvements: - Tests for fpga commands - Kconfig cleanup, code cleanup MAINTAINERS updating - DM/DT: - MPC83xx device tree additions (CPU and RAM) - Various ofnode/DT improvements - Marvell SoC improvements: - Multiple updates to the turris boards / platform - i.MX SoC improvements - Pico board updates, imx6ull pinmux fixes - EFI improvements: - Now very close to being able to run UEFI Shell and SCT. - This brought in a number of FAT improvements - Sandbox support - Lots of general EFI improvements and cleanups - Xilinx platform updates: - Zynq/ZynqMP cleanups - In SPL we now handle (read: uncompress) in FIT images for entries other than the kernel. - Freescale QorIQ: - Switching to driver model on a number of platforms for eSDHC and SATA. - PowerPC: - Use device tree for mpc85xx, enable on T2080QDS. - SoCFPGA, sunxi and uniphier SoC improvements. - UBI, i2c, SuperH, MIPS, USB, M68K, x86, video and DM improvements.

With all of that being pulled from merge commits. I should honestly consider making tags for myself as the rest of this is reading of my own commits (not authored of course): - A lot of stm32, Amlogic, db410, TI, at91/sama*, Broadcom and Spear family improvements and additions including new SoCs. - All of this means more DM conversions / switching to of a number of drivers. - Some serial driver improvements - Switch to the Linux Kernel style of unified {s,u}{8,16,32,64} types. - ARM926EJS families now have caches enabled. - The long-running generic system firmware loader has been merged now. - W1 support.

I will follow the usual rule of an -rc every other Monday and we're looking at release on November 12th, 2018.

Thanks all!