Linux 4.18 Kernel Likely Faces A Week Delay Due To Last Minute Issues

Linus Torvalds was looking at releasing Linux 4.18 this coming weekend but it looks like that is no longer going to happen with instead seeing a 4.18-rc8 test release.

A late regression in the VMA code has caused IA64 not to boot with Linux 4.18. Linus is going to revert the change causing that breakage in the memory management code. But he notes that he will likely do a 4.18-rc8 change due to that glaring issue and other last minute changes.

He noted that in the few days since 4.18-rc7 were already ninety commits, a rather high amount for what was just days away from the expected kernel stable release. "I _prefer_ just the regular cadence of releases, but when I have a reason to delay, I'll delay," Torvalds commented.

Coming in just today were some urgent power management fixes too, including a change to fix Intel Skylake desktop CPUs potentially seeing their iGPU performance hampered following the recent I/O-wait boost optimizations intended just for server platforms. There are also some fixes to Intel's Turbostat utility too.

Thus we're looking at Linux 4.18-rc8 next Sunday, 5 August, and the official release then the following Sunday on 12 August followed by the opening of the merge window for Linux 4.19.