Announcement for Linux 4.8-rc1 [1]:

> It's been two weeks, and the merge window for 4.8 is thus closed.
>
> Due to travel last week, I actually still have a few pull requests
> pending in my inbox that I just wanted to take another look at before
> merging, but the large bulk of the merge window material has been
> merged, and I wanted to make sure there aren't any new ones coming in.
>
> This seems to be building up to be one of the bigger releases lately,
> but let's see how it all ends up. The merge window has been fairly
> normal, although the patch itself looks somewhat unusual: over 20% of
> the patch is documentation updates, due to conversion of the drm and
> media documentation from docbook to the Sphinx doc format. There are
> other doc updates, but that's the big bulk of it.
>
> If you ignore the documentation format change, things look fairly
> regular, with about 60% of the non-documentation diffs being drivers
> (gpu, networking, media, sound, etc)  and about 15% being arch updates
> (arm, powerpc and x86 dominate, but there's mips and s390 too).
>
> The rest is spread out - core networking, tooling (mainly perf),
> include files, core kernel, vfs and low-level filesystems (xfs stands
> out). Few areas escaped:
>
>   10787 files changed, 612208 insertions(+), 272098 deletions(-)
>
> Go out and test. The diffs and logs are too big to post, so as usual
> for rc1, I'm just appending my "merge log" for a very high-level view.

Announcement for Linux 4.8-rc2 [2].

While at it, select `EARLY_PRINTK_DBGP` as an alternative to the serial
port to get Linux kernel messages [3].

```
$ diff -u /boot/config-4.7.0.mx64.94 /boot/config-4.8.0-rc2.mx64.95
[…]
-# CONFIG_EARLY_PRINTK_DBGP is not set
+CONFIG_EARLY_PRINTK_DBGP=y
[…]
```

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/8/7/93
[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/8/14/874
[3] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/x86/earlyprintk.txt

The source has to be patched, so that it builds with Linux 4.8-rc2
[1][2].

Note, that due to the handling of the extraversion `-rc2`, this is
currently put into the wrong directory, and `sudo /sbin/nvidiactl`
fails.

[1] http://rglinuxtech.com/?p=1788
[2] https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/954279/linux/nvidia-367-35-dkms-build-errors-for-a-4-7-0-kernel/

Adapt the script to take the extra version into account, and put the
modules into the correct directory.

*   before: /usr/share/nvidia/kernel/4.8.0.mx64.95
*   after: /usr/share/nvidia/kernel/4.8.0-rc2.mx64.95

Here are some examples used for testing.

```
$ test=$(beeversion --format "%V.mx64.%r" linux-4.8_rc2-95.x86_64); if [[ $test =~ ^([0-9]+\.[0-9]+)_?(.*)(\.mx64.*) ]]; then echo "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}.0-${BASH_REMATCH[2]}${BASH_REMATCH[3]}"; fi
4.8.0-rc2.mx64.95
test=$(beeversion --format "%V.mx64.%r" linux-4.8-95.x86_64); if [[ $test =~ ^([0-9]+\.[0-9]+)_?(.*)(\.mx64.*) ]]; then echo "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}.0-${BASH_REMATCH[2]}${BASH_REMATCH[3]}"; fi
4.8.0-.mx64.95
$ test=$(beeversion --format "%V.mx64.%r" linux-4.8_rc2-95.x86_64); if [[ $test =~ ^([0-9]+\.[0-9]+)(_?.*)(\.mx64.*) ]]; then echo "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}.0${BASH_REMATCH[2]}${BASH_REMATCH[3]}"; fi
4.8.0_rc2.mx64.95
$ test=$(beeversion --format "%V.mx64.%r" linux-4.8-95.x86_64); if [[ $test =~ ^([0-9]+\.[0-9]+)(_?.*)(\.mx64.*) ]]; then echo "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}.0${BASH_REMATCH[2]}${BASH_REMATCH[3]}"; fi
4.8.0.mx64.95
```

As you can see, it currently doesn’t work, when the package has no extra
version.

Currently, Using a Linux release without an extra version, a dash is
added to the directory name, breaking the script `/sbin/nvidiactl`. Fix
it by composing the correct name with the *e* placeholder.

Note, this requires at least bee 1.2.11, so that the format placeholder
*d* is present in `beeversion`.