Linus Torvalds is really pleased with "quite well-behaved" Linux 5.18, so far

With the launch of the latest Linux 5.18-rc6 release candidate, Linux boss Linus Torvalds has expressed he is really satisfied with how things have been going with Linux 5.18 so far. He notes that although the 5.18 kernel will be one of the largest releases, the release candidates (rc) generally have been quite small.

Torvalds writes:

So 5.18 is looking like it's going to be one of the larger releases in numbers of commits (we'll see where it ends up - it's going to be neck-and-neck with 5.14 right now, but won't be as big as 5.13 was). But despite the merge window being big, the release candidates have generally been quite modest in size, and rc6 continues that trend. I keep expecting the other shoe to drop, but 5.18 just seems to be quite well-behaved.

Let's see if this jinxes it, but nothing looks particularly scary here.

After that, Torvalds also mentions what more work remains to be done before the final release which is expected to happen by the end of this month:

rc6 looks to be mostly some driver updates (network drivers and rdma stand out, small random fixes elsewhere), with the usual smattering of architecture updates (x86 kvm fixes, but also a long-standing x86 kernel FP use issue, and a smattering of parisc and powerpc fixes). And some wireguard selftest updates. The rest is mostly some btrfs fixes, some core networking, and just random small one-offs elsewhere.

You can find the full conversation about Linux 5.18-rc6 on LKML here.

Via: Phoronix