All,

A couple of notable features that made it into 5.17 at the halfway
mark of the merge window might be of interest to you - especially
for Elana and Paul from their LFSC WG and OSEP WG lead hats on in
their review of memory management and race detection features for
safety.

1. Pulling slabs out of struct page
The struct page fields used by the slab allocators have been moved into
a separate structure. Refer to this LWN article for information on
an earlier version: https://lwn.net/Articles/871982/ - excerpts from
this article that outline benefits of this change:

"This might seem like a lot of work to put an old structure into a new
form, but there are a number of reasons to want something like this.
Just pulling the slab-specific fields out of struct page simplifies that
structure significantly. Using a separate type makes it clear which variant
of the page structure the code expects to deal with, and it adds a degree of
type safety; it is no longer possible to accidentally access the wrong union
fields."

2. KCSAN can detect some missing memory barriers
Refer to the article for details of this change: https://lwn.net/Articles/877200/
Documentation changes that went in for more information:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=82eb6911d909

For full set of changes that went into 5.17 at the halfway mark of the merge window:
https://lwn.net/Articles/880909/ (LWN subscribe only page - will become available
for all next week.

thanks,
-- Shuah