diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index 317b9fa21..14ce0dbd1 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -1,8 +1,8 @@
 # Ohai Changelog
 
-## Unreleased
-* Remove dependency on mime-types gem
-* Skip the VMware plugin if DMI data doesn't indicate we're on a VMware system
+## Release 8.8.1
+* [pr#677](https://github.com/chef/ohai/pull/677) Remove dependency on mime-types gem
+* [pr#662](https://github.com/chef/ohai/pull/662) Skip the VMware plugin if DMI data doesn't indicate we're on a VMware system
 
 ## Release 8.8.0
 * [**James Flemer, NDP LLC**](https://github.com/jflemer-ndp):
diff --git a/RELEASE_NOTES.md b/RELEASE_NOTES.md
index 09284b913..a5f8813b2 100644
--- a/RELEASE_NOTES.md
+++ b/RELEASE_NOTES.md
@@ -8,28 +8,7 @@ Details about the thing that changed that needs to get included in the Release N
 -->
 
 # Ohai Release Notes:
-## Virtualization
-With this release we greatly improved detection of virtualization guests:
-- We now detect Linux/BSD guests running on the RedHat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) platform, Microsoft Hyper-V, and additional versions of Microsoft VirtualPC.
-- BSD systems gained detection of guests running on VirtualBox, KVM, and Openstack.
-- Windows systems gained detection of guests running on Virtualbox, VMware, and KVM.
-- BSD now includes the nested virtualization support, which was added to other platforms in the 7.2.0 release.
-- A new plugin was added for VirtualBox to expose information on the version of the guest additions package, as well as the version of the VirtualBox host.
 
-## BSD
-Initial support for Support for DragonFly BSD was added.
-
-BSD also saw several improvements to better align collected data with that of Linux systems:
-- The filesystem plugin now collects inode data for each filesystem
-- CPU detection has been fixed on FreeBSD 10.2 and later systems. We're also collecting CPU model and family data to match CPU data on Linux systems.
-- The code to parse dmidecode data to detect virtualization guests is now shared between BSD and Linux systems for consistent detection of virtualization guests.
-
-## Miscellaneous
-- Collected zfs filesystem properties are now configurable on solaris2.
-- The path to the Ohai plugins directory is now escaped to prevent failures on Windows systems if the path included spaces.
-- The AIX CPU plugin now detects the bitness of the system.
-- Ohai now longer fails under certain circumstances when determining network listeners
-
-# Ohai Breaking Changes:
-- Linux guests running on Hyper-V were previously detected as running on VirtualPC, but are now correctly detected as Hyper-V guests.
-- Core and CPU counts on Windows were based on the first CPU only. Counts will now take into account all physical CPUs.
+This is a patch release with the following fixes:
+* [pr#677](https://github.com/chef/ohai/pull/677) Removed dependency on mime-types gem. This could cause failures in some scenarios.
+* [pr#662](https://github.com/chef/ohai/pull/662) Skip loading the VMWare plug-in when we don't need it (e.g. on non-VMWare systems)
diff --git a/lib/ohai/version.rb b/lib/ohai/version.rb
index 39a6c7327..763b5983b 100644
--- a/lib/ohai/version.rb
+++ b/lib/ohai/version.rb
@@ -18,5 +18,5 @@
 
 module Ohai
   OHAI_ROOT = File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__))
-  VERSION = '8.8.0'
+  VERSION = '8.8.1'
 end