Linux 6.18-rc1 is now available for testing with the [1]Linux 6.18 merge window closed. Linux 6.18 will be out in December and is anticipated to become this year's Linux LTS kernel version.

Linux 6.18 is bringing a wide variety of new features and changes as we have been covering the past two weeks and prior to that with the interesting "-next" changes. Linux 6.18 is bringing a lot more Rust code, Intel USBIO drivers, various file-system improvements, continued Intel preparations for Wildcat Lake, the Rust-based Tyr Arm Mali DRM driver is merged, Rocket is added as the Rockchip NPU accelerator driver, haptic touchpad support was contributed by Google, various AMD Versal additions, DM-PCACHE is introduced as a persistant cache target, better handling in the network stack against DDoS attacks, SiFive Premier P550 mainline support, more Apple M2 SoC support upstreamed, KVM x86 CET virtualization, and much more. I will have up my usual Linux kernel feature overview for Linux 6.18 in the coming days on Phoronix.

There's a lot in store with Linux 6.18 and I will also be kicking off my Linux 6.18 kernel benchmarks in the days to come across different hardware.

Update: Linus Torvalds wrote in the [2]6.18-rc1 announcement :

Things look fairly normal: size-wise this is pretty much right in the middle of the pack, and nothing particular stands out in the shortlog of merges this merge window appended below. About half the diff is drivers, with the res being all over: vfs and filesystems, arch updates (although much of that is actually devicetree stuff, so it's arguably more driver-related), tooling, rust support etc etc.

This was one of the good merge windows where I didn't end up having to bisect any particular problem on nay of the machines I was testing. Let's hope that success mostly translates to the bigger picture too.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+6.18

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=whPJTtX5u1m47fPUD2g2Dc=Did_6OqCVj6OQPKFgfKn9g@mail.gmail.com/