Linus Torvalds, the founder and maintainer of the Linux kernel, has just released the second release candidate of Linux 6.18. Torvalds said this week contained no huge surprises, which is certainly promising for a stable development cycle and timely release. With that said, there were a number of regressions found in the first release candidate so some of those needed to be fixed, luckily some turned out to be trivial configuration issues.
While no huge surprises were encountered this time, Torvalds did say that this release was on the bigger side and that some of the regressions are still outstanding, but slow progress will be made over the course of the release. He said that it’s still early days for Linux 6.18 so he’s not very worried and things look “fairly normal”.
Regarding trivial configuration issues mentioned earlier, Torvalds said there was a case in big-endian SH4 which had bugs in the QEMU test environment. He said, luckily, that these were not actually new kernel bugs.
The announcement was topped off with a call for developers to keep testing the new kernel update, this is pretty standard. If you do decide to have a look into testing it, be sure to do so on a virtual machine or non-production machine as the kernel is a low-lying component and can easily cause you a headache if things go wrong.
The second release candidate brought with it plenty of subsystem fixes for major components such as KVM, AMDGPU, BPF, and filesystems like Btrfs and ext4. There was also a commit made by Torvalds himself that says a long-standing ext3 defconfig option was removed, suggesting some minor clean up and maintenance is happening too. It’s important to keep in mind that these release candidates aren’t about introducing new features; that is done during the merge window. The release candidates are for stabilizing features before they’re given to the public.
Source: LKML