I’ve started poking around the MySQL 5.7.1 source tree (although just from tarball as I don’t see a BZR tree yet). I thought I’d share a few thoughts:

• InnoDB temporary tables. Not REDO logged. What does this mean? It’s a huge step in removing the dependency on MEMORY and MyISAM engines for temporary tables used in query execution. With InnoDB temporary tables there is no reason for MEMORY engine to continue to exist, there is absolutely no way in which it is better.
• InnoDB temp tables aren’t insert buffered
  This probably doesn’t really matter as you’re not going to be doing REDO logging for them (plus things are generally short lived)… but it could be a future area for performance improvement
• The NO_REDO log mode appears to be implemented fairly neatly.
• Improvements in innodb read only mode. What does this mean? Maybe we can finally get rid of the oddity of compressed …