Linux 6.18-rc3 released and everything still looks normal

Linus Torvalds has just released the third release candidate of Linux 6.18. He said that this release candidate is calmer than usual with normal fluctuations in pull request timing. The summary of changes turned out to be “pretty short and flat.” The 'calmness' of this development cycle is good because it means Linux 6.18 will likely arrive on time, instead of being delayed by a few weeks.

According to Torvalds, the biggest change this week was a significant set of fixes related to smbdirect on the client and server sides. The overall changes in this update were normal with half of them being for drivers and the rest being “pretty random and spread out” including fixes for XFS and other subsystems.

Regarding driver and hardware updates this update brings DRM fixes for amd/display, panthor, i915 and the drm/panic screen drawing utility. There were also fixes for hardware monitoring components such as PMBus, gpd-fan, and sht3x as well as PCI/ACPI components such as ASPM, DWC, and Gpio-ACPI.

Filesystems that received fixes include XFS, BTRFS, EROFS, CIFS, Hugetlbfs, and OCFS2. There were multiple fixes for XFS regarding locking, deprecated/defunct mount options, and zone caching. BTRFS got fixes for ref-verify and delayed_node use after free, while EROFS fixes include encoded extents and compact indexes. All of these fixes will boost data integrity, system stability, and help to prevent severe failures.

Linux 6.18 should have seven or eight release candidates over the coming weeks. This means we can expect it to be released on November 23 or 30. If we see a calmer development cycle, we should get it on the earlier of those dates. When you actually receive it on your devices depends entirely on your Linux distribution. Those on rolling releases or Fedora will get it sooner while those on Ubuntu and Ubuntu derivatives will get it later on, if at all.

Source: LKML

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Posted Monday 27 October 2025 at 5:58 pm AEST (my time).

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