Linus Torvalds: Linux 6.18-rc4

From    Linus Torvalds <>
Date    Sun, 2 Nov 2025 11:50:34 -0800
Subject    Linux 6.18-rc4
    

I'm cutting rc4 a couple of hours early, because I am about to get on
a plane for conference travel. But things look calm and pretty normal,
and I'm traveling with my laptop, so apart from slight timing oddities
that shouldn't affect anything.

Last week in fact felt *so* calm that I was surprised to notice that
rc4 isn't really smaller than usual: all the stats look very normal,
both in number of changes and where the changes are. The bulk is
driver fixes, with - as is the norm - gpu, networking and sound driver
leading the charge.

The non-driver changes are pretty spread out: we've got core
networking, we've got filesystems (smb, xfs and nfsd), and we've got
core kernel (sched_ext) and architecture fixes (s390 and x86).

And some new selftests for the issues found (mainly vfio).

None of it looks particularly scary, and a lot of it is trivial one-
and few-liners.

Shortlog appended for people who want to get more of a detailed look
into the fixes from last week, but in general it all feels like we're
on schedule and doing fine.

Talking about schedule: while 6.18 looks normal so far (knock wood),
during the next release we will have not only the yearly kernel
maintainer summit and associated travel during the merge window, we'll
also have the whole holiday season thing going on later in the
release. Right now I don't think it will affect things much - I
suspect I'll do the by now usual "we'll drag out the 6.19 release by a
week to make up for time lost to holidays", but that obviously depends
on 6.18 all continuing as normal etc. So things can still change.

                  Linus