Linux 4.18 Kernel Officially Released

Following the one week setback, the Linux 4.18 kernel is now officially available just a little more than two months since the cycle officially began.

Linux 4.18 is now shipping and the latest kernel carrying the continued "Merciless Moray" codename.

Linus Torvalds wrote of the 4.18 final release, "It was a very calm week, and arguably I could just have released on schedule last week, but we did have some minor updates. Mostly networking, but some vfs race fixes (mentioned in the rc8 announcement as "pending") and a couple of driver fixes (scsi, networking, i2c). Some other minor random things (arm crypto fix, parisc memory ordering
fix)."

See our Linux 4.18 feature overview if you are not familiar with all of the magnificent work that went into this kernel update from better open-source graphics drivers to BPFILTER to Spectre updates for 64-bit ARM and the inaugural Steam Controller kernel driver. If you are short on time you can also just checkout the best features of Linux 4.18.

With Linux 4.18 now shipping, the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window is open for merging and it's going to be quite a big kernel update. Linux 4.19 also is likely the last kernel release prior to Linux 5.0.

From Linux 4.17 to 4.18 there are 13,067 files changed with 578,788 insertions and 677,480 deletions -- less lines of code thanks to a lot of outdated code having been stripped from this new kernel.