[ANNOUNCE] Linux v6.16-epic1

Hello linux-ia64!

It's time to bump up the version, and get the EPIC code up to date
with latest upstream! Of course, reverts of some bits and pieces of
code that is needed by Itanium still have to be done, but they are
sparse at this point, and the process is mostly painless: four whole
upstream versions were successfully merged over an extended weekend,
with some minimal help from parallel johnny-mnemonic fork.

With this release, a new commit model is adopted: upstream is merged
into the fork at relevant tags. This allows to push normally into the
master-epic branch, and track which linux-ia64 patches were applied
after the merge of which upstream release. New branches will no longer
be created for upstream releases.

Known issues:

- See https://github.com/linux-ia64/linux-ia64/issues

Fixes:

- None

Some changes in tools/ and scripts/ had Itanium-specific code removed.
This is not addressed yet in this release. Also, unimplemented
syscalls are piling up, so it's nearly time for to make that up to
date.

As always, the release can be obtained in patch or whole source code
from our repo, at:
https://github.com/linux-ia64/linux-ia64/releases/tag/v6.16-epic1

Tom=C3=A1=C5=A1