Linus Torvalds Announces First Linux 5.18 Kernel Release Candidate

Linux 5.18

Linus Torvalds announced today the general availability for public testing of the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone of the upcoming Linux 5.18 kernel series, due out in late May 2022.

Two weeks have passed since the release of Linux kernel 5.17 and the merge window for Linux kernel 5.18, the next major kernel series, is now officially closed with the launch of the first Release Candidate (RC).

Linux kernel 5.18 is shaping up to be an interesting release that promises even more improvements for AMD GPUs with a lot of work around the AMDGPU graphics driver, as well as updates for various Intel performance monitoring event tables. It looks like there’s a little bit of everything for everyone.

According to Linus Torvalds, things look fairly normal for Linux 5.18 and the bulk of it is various driver updates, about 60 percent of the whole changes, but there are also improvements around networking, sound, media, SCSI, pinctrl, clk, and other areas.

“The rest is fairly spread out documentation and devicetree bindings (maybe I should just count that against drivers), architecture updates (biggest part of the diff: nds32 is gone, but there’s all the usual x86, arm, arm64, powerpc, parisc, mips and riscv updates). Tooling updates (perf and selftests), and of course all the core kernel updates (filesystem, core, networking, VM),” said Linus Torvalds.

Linux kernel 5.18’s release date could be either May 22nd or May 29th, depending on how many Release Candidate milestones will be released during the entire development cycle.

If there will only be seven Release Candidate milestones, then the final release of Linux kernel 5.18 is expected on May 22nd, 2022. But, if Linus Torvalds decides that an eighth Release Candidate is also needed, then we’re looking at May 29th as the final release date for the Linux 5.18 series.

Until then, if you want to help the kernel developers find and fix bugs in Linux 5.18 kernel series, go ahead and download the first Release Candidate from the kernel.org website. However, please try to keep in mind that this is an early development version, NOT suitable for use in production machines!

Last updated 2 years ago

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