Linux 5.18-rc2 Released With The Kernel So Far Looking "Fairly Normal"

Following last week's first release candidate of Linux 5.18 that capped off the two week merge window, Linux 5.18-rc2 was just issued as the newest weekly release candidate.

This week has brought many bug/regression fixes flowing into the kernel. One notable change that did make it in this week for Linux 5.18-rc2 is the opportunistically trying to initialize /dev/urandom. This should make /dev/random and /dev/urandom behave similar for at least x86_64 and other prominent architectures.

Linus Torvalds wrote in the 5.18-rc2 announcement, "Things look fairly normal here, although it's early in the release cycle so it's a bit hard to say for sure. But at least it's not looking particularly odd, and we have fixes all over. Drivers is the bulk of it, and there's a little bit of everything here, although the AMD GPU driver fixes are perhaps the most noticeable. But there's also networking, scsi, rdma, block, you name it..."

See our Linux 5.18 feature overview to learn more about all of the changes coming with Linux 5.18. The Linux 5.18 stable release should be out by the end of May depending upon how the release cycle plays out over the weeks ahead.

Stay tuned for more Linux 5.18 benchmarks soon on Phoronix.