Holiday season could delay Linux 6.19, Torvalds warns after smooth Linux 6.18-rc4

Linus Torvalds, the founder of the Linux kernel, has announced the release of Linux 6.18-rc4. He declared that this week felt “calm and pretty normal” and that it’s “on schedule and doing fine.” This is really good news because it is more likely that the release will be on November 30, instead of December 7 after an eighth release candidate.

The eccentric kernel maintainer did mention that the fourth release candidate was cut a few hours early because he had to catch a plane to attend a conference. He said that this should not have affected anything except “slight timing oddities.”

Paradoxically, while the week was described as feeling calm, the volume and location of changes were “very normal”. Most of the work was dedicated to routine driver fixes with GPU, networking, and sound drivers being the categories that received the most attention.

Aside from drivers, there were also fixes in core networking and filesystems (smb and xfs), core kernel scheduler improvements (sched_ext), and architecture fixes for s390 and x86. Torvalds said that none of the changes this week are very scary and more are trivial one- and few-liners.

While Linux 6.18 looks to be shaping up nicely and it seems we will get it on time, things look a bit less reassuring for Linux 6.19. Two big events that are expected to complicate the next development cycle are the yearly kernel maintainer summit and associated travel, which take place during the merge window, and the holiday season later in the release.

With this, Torvalds anticipates that Linux 6.19 will be dragged out by an extra week to account for the lost time. This plan is reliant on the fact that no delays happen with Linux 6.18, if they do, things can still change.

Once Linux 6.18 is out, it’ll be up to distribution maintainers to publish it as an update for their users. Some of those on Fedora or rolling releases should expect it within a few weeks of launch while other distributions may make people wait substantially longer or until a new version arrives.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Monday 3 November 2025 at 6:11 pm AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

RIP Matrix