Linux 5.18-rc3 Released - "Yes, Yes, It's Also Easter Sunday, But Priorities, People!"

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.18-rc3 as the Easter Sunday kernel for testing as Linux 5.18 works its way toward a stable release toward the end of May.

As for this week's changes in Linux 5.18-rc3, Linus Torvalds commented, "Things continue to look quite regular, although the diffstat may look a bit odd due to some email updates that ended up causing a lot of spread-out one-liner updates in the devicetree files. There's also a series to sound card probing error handling fixes ("Fix the missing snd_card_free() call at probe error") which ends up showing as a lot of few-lines across a number of sound drivers. But it all looks pretty small and fairly simple. Famous last words."

While just sticking to the usual weekly release candidate regiment each Sunday, as for today being Easter there was the comment by Torvalds: "It's Sunday afternoon, and you all know what that means. It's time for another release candidate. (Yes, yes, it's also Easter Sunday, but priorities, people!)"

See all of his commentary in the 5.18-rc3 announcement.

It's been a fairly quiet week with not many notable changes in particular. Hitting the tree today though were some Intel TSX fixes including where systems could be left vulnerable to the TSX Async Abort "TAA" vulnerability. Those TSX fixes will also be back-ported to stable kernels.

See our Linux 5.18 feature overview for more details on all of the changes coming with this spring major kernel release.