I had to let it go. Linux 5.18-rc4 has arrived in another quiet week, but because its developer, Linus Torvalds, does not work on Ubuntu or any of its flavors, nor in a medium that had to cover all the releases that took place during the week. The four weeks that Linux 5.18 has been Release Candidate have been very quiet, and Torvalds suspects that the hustle and bustle will come in the next few weeks.
Most of the changes, and the commits and diffstats they have been small, have had to do with a patch to kill a zombie file that had already been deleted, or more specifically renamed. But he didn't stay "dead" because he was resurrected by mistakenly introducing a fusion.
Linux 5.18 is going well, but everything could change in the coming weeks
A fairly slow and quiet week, which makes me suspect that the other shoe will drop at some point.
But maybe things are going too well on this release. After all, it is normal for it to happen from time to time.
Not only is it a fairly small set of commits, the diffstat is quite small and flat as well. The biggest patch is literally killing a zombie file that had already been deleted - well, renamed, actually - once, but didn't know it was meant to stay dead, and was resurrected by a merge bug.
Changes are spread all over the place, but they're not that big: architecture updates (sound is the biggest part, but "major" is pretty misleading), some driver updates, a couple of file system fixes, management memory, networking, and some tools (mainly a couple of self-tests).
Linux 5.18 is expected to arrive in the form of a stable version next May 22, unless Torvalds fears are fulfilled and they have to launch at least one RC8, in which case it would arrive on May 27. Ubuntu users who want to install it right away will need to do so on their own or by using tools like Ubuntu Mainline Kernel Installer.