I will be branching master for M2 today around 2pm Pacific in preparation for rc1. A new GPG key has been created for yocto project tags. Our old one was tied to my email address and we wanted to have a more generic key. I will send that out when I send out the build start email tonight.
A pre-build of master indicates that it is mostly free of major build issues. A few outstanding issues seem to revolve around lsb builds.