Linux 6.18-rc1 is now available for testing with the 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.
