news
Linux 6.18-rc4
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LWN ☛ Linux 6.18-rc4 [LWN.net]
I'm cutting rc4 a couple of hours early, because I am about to get on a plane for conference travel. But things look calm and pretty normal, and I'm traveling with my laptop, so apart from slight timing oddities that shouldn't affect anything.
Last week in fact felt *so* calm that I was surprised to notice that rc4 isn't really smaller than usual: all the stats look very normal, both in number of changes and where the changes are. The bulk is driver fixes, with - as is the norm - gpu, networking and sound driver leading the charge.
The non-driver changes are pretty spread out: we've got core networking, we've got filesystems (smb, xfs and nfsd), and we've got core kernel (sched_ext) and architecture fixes (s390 and x86).
And some new selftests for the issues found (mainly vfio).
None of it looks particularly scary, and a lot of it is trivial one- and few-liners.
Shortlog appended for people who want to get more of a detailed look into the fixes from last week, but in general it all feels like we're on schedule and doing fine.
Talking about schedule: while 6.18 looks normal so far (knock wood), during the next release we will have not only the yearly kernel maintainer summit and associated travel during the merge window, we'll also have the whole holiday season thing going on later in the release. Right now I don't think it will affect things much - I suspect I'll do the by now usual "we'll drag out the 6.19 release by a week to make up for time lost to holidays", but that obviously depends on 6.18 all continuing as normal etc. So things can still change.
Linus -
LWN ☛ Kernel prepatch 6.18-rc4 [LWN.net]
Linus has released 6.18-rc4 for testing. ""Last week in fact felt *so* calm that I was surprised to notice that rc4 isn't really smaller than usual: all the stats look very normal, both in number of changes and where the changes are.""
Neowin:
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Holiday season could delay Linux 6.19, Torvalds warns after smooth Linux 6.18-rc4
Linus Torvalds has published the fourth release candidate of Linux 6.18. However, a warning of delays to Linux 6.19 has also been issued.
More here:
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Torvalds expects delay for Linux 6.19
Linus Torvalds warns that the next Linux kernel, version 6.19, will likely be delayed by about a week. The founder of the Linux project writes that the upcoming development cycle will be affected by the annual Kernel Maintainers Summit and the holiday season, leaving less time for integration and testing.
The announcement coincided with the release of Linux 6.18-rc4, which Torvalds published slightly earlier than usual because he had to leave for conference trips. According to him, the development of Linux 6.18 is continuing smoothly and without major problems, so the final release is still expected at the end of November.