Linus Torvalds is out today with the eighth weekly test release of the [1]Linux 6.18 kernel in working toward the stable release at the end of the month.

Linux 6.18-rc6 is out today with another week's worth of random fixes and improvements. It was a fairly smooth week and things appear to be pacing well for releasing Linux 6.18 stable on time in two weeks: 30 November. Otherwise there could be a one-week slip to 7 December but as it stands now it looks like it will be tracking well for releasing at the end of November.

Linux 6.18-rc6 brings some new audio hardware support in terms of [2]USB audio quirks for various PureAudio devices , [3]another code reviewer added for EROFS , [4]another maintainer for the DEC Alpha CPU port , [5]AMD CPU microcode detection updates for the Zen 5 RDSEED issue , and [6]fixing a "catastophic performance issue" for 64-bit ARM . Plus other small bug fixes throughout.

Linus Torvalds wrote in the [7]6.18-rc6 announcement :

"So we have a slightly larger rc6 than usual, but I think it's just the random noise and a result of pull request timings rather than due to any issues with the release. But I guess we have a couple of weeks remaining to find out....

The fixes are all over the place, and nothing stands out, except for how it really is pretty varied. It's all small one- and few-liners, with the biggest patches all being to the selftests rather than actual kernel code. In fact, the selftests account for over a quarter of the rc6 patch.

Outside of the selftests, drivers account for (only) a quarter of the rest of the changes - again, I think this is more a sign of pull request timings rather than anything else, and the reason rc6 is on the larger side is just that we ended up having a number of varied fixes pulls just happen to come in this week.

Another quarter of the kernel changes is from architecture fixes (arm64, loongarch and x86), and the rest is really pretty mixed random stuff (networking, bpf, core kernel, filesystems, core VM - just a little bit of everything)."

See our [8]Linux 6.18 feature overview to learn more about the Linux 6.18 new features/changes at large.



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

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/PureAudio-DAC-Linux-6.18-Audio

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/EROFS-Gains-Extra-Reviewer

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-DEC-Alpha-2025-Maintainer

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Zen-5-More-RDSEED-ucode

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.18-ARM64-Atomics-Issue

[7] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wj0Lh7k3d4S1K5YaCaXhfn61f1xNfkN5D_R5NtVVxDRFg@mail.gmail.com/T/#u

[8] https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-618-features