Linus Torvalds, the developer of Linux, announced the release of another release candidate on the mailing list. The latest release candidate, Linux Kernel 5.18-rc6, marks an important step before the Linux 5.18 release, which is expected to be in May.
One of the largest releases
Torvalds also stated that he is satisfied with the development of 5.18 so far and noted that 5.18 will be one of the largest releases. He also stated that the work that remains to be done is mostly btrfs fixes, core networking, and small one-offs. Linus Torvalds said,
« So 5.18 is looking like it’s going to be one of the larger releases in numbers of commits (we’ll see where it ends up – it’s going to be neck-and-neck with 5.14 right now, but won’t be as big as 5.13 was). But despite the merge window being big, the release candidates have generally been quite modest in size, and rc6 continues that trend. I keep expecting the other shoe to drop, but 5.18 just seems to be quite well-behaved.
Let’s see if this jinxes it, but nothing looks particularly scary here. rc6 looks to be mostly some driver updates (network drivers and rdma stand out, small random fixes elsewhere), with the usual smattering of architecture updates (x86 kvm fixes, but also a long-standing x86 kernel FP use issue, and a smattering of parisc and powerpc fixes). And some wireguard selftest updates.
The rest is mostly some btrfs fixes, some core networking, and just random small one-offs elsewhere.
Please do go test it all out, because things may look good now, but continued testing is the only thing that will make sure. »