After first Release Candidate from last week, Linus Torvalds launched a few hours ago Linux 5.18-rc2. It was Sunday afternoon, according to her schedule, and the first thing she said is that everything seems pretty normal, although it's early to tell if things will change and get uglier in the future. We are in the second Release Candidate, and that there is nothing strange this week may mean that nothing alarming has appeared in the period in which it usually does.
The father of Linux also says that there are patches all over, but most of them are taken by the drivers. Once again, we have to go back to a usual suspect, since the AMD GPU drivers are what attract the most attention. We remember that last week we talked about how this version of Linux will introduce many new features for Intel and AMD hardware.
Linux 5.18-rc2 seems normal, but it's too early to assess the situation
It's Sunday afternoon for me, which means "rc launch time". Things seem pretty normal here, though it's early in the release cycle so it's a bit hard to say for sure. But at least it doesn't look particularly weird, and we've got fixes all over the place. Drivers are the biggest part, and there's a bit of everything, though AMD's GPU driver fixes are perhaps the most notable. But there are also network solutions, scsi, rdma, block, whatever...
After Linux 5.18-rc2 will come the third Release Candidate, and the stable version is initially scheduled for the May 22. Although something may go wrong in the next few weeks and an 5.18th RC will be necessary, in which case we will have Linux 29 on May 5.15th. We remind you that Ubuntu users who want to install that kernel will eventually have to do so on their own, and that Jammy Jellyfish will be using Linux XNUMX LTS.