Linux 4.18-rc7 is now available for public testing

Jul 30, 2018 10:30 GMT  ·  By

Linus Torvalds announced over the weekend the seventh and probably the last Release Candidate (RC) milestone in the development cycle of the forthcoming Linux 4.18 kernel, and teased us with the final release for next week.

Linux kernel 4.18 RC7 is now available for public testing, and Linus Torvalds reports that there's nothing out of the ordinary in this build except for some minor bug fixes, signaling that this is the last Release Candidate in the upcoming Linux kernel series, which could debut at the end of this week, on August 5, 2018.

"Nothing particularly odd happened this last week - we got the usual random set of various minor fixes all over. About two-thirds of it is drivers - networking, staging and USB stands out, but there's a little bit of stuff all over (CLK, block, GPU, NVMe)," said Linus Torvalds. "So unless something odd happens, this should be the last RC for 4.18."

Highlights of Linux kernel 4.18

The Linux 4.18 kernel promises several new features and improvements that might interest some of you out there. Among some of its highlights, we can mention Spectre Variant 1 and 2 mitigations for the 32-bit ARM architecture, as well as a just-in-time compiler for eBPF programs on the 32-bit (x86) architecture.

Linux 4.18 also includes Spectre Variant 4 mitigations for ARM64 (AArch64) and ARMv8 architectures, improved discard support for the F2FS file system, better support for USB Type-C and USB 3.2 connections, official support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 ARM chip, and initial support for the upcoming Radeon Vega 20 GPUs.

As expected, there are also numerous other improvements and new drivers for better hardware support and additional performance in the Linux 4.18 kernel. The final release should be out on Sunday, August 5, 2018, but it would take a couple of weeks until it lands in the software repositories of popular GNU/Linux distributions.

Until then, you can download the Linux kernel 4.18 Release Candidate 7 right now from kernel.org or via our web portal if you want to take it for a test drive. However, please keep in mind not to replace your stable kernel with it, nor install it on a production environment.

Update 31/07/18: It looks like Linus Torvalds changed his mind and delayed the release of the Linux 4.18 kernel with a week. An eighth Release Candidate should be out instead this Sunday, on August 5, and the final Linux kernel 4.18 release will be out on August 12, 2018.

"I think I'll do an rc8 with the revert, just so that we'll have some time to figure this out. It's only Tuesday, but I already have 90 commits since rc7, so this isn't the only issue we're having. I _prefer_ just the regular cadence of releases, but when I have a reason to delay, I'll delay," wrote Linus Torvalds on the Linux kernel mailing list.