Linux Kernel 6.18 Officially Released (9to5linux.com) 10
From the blog 9to5Linux:
Linux kernel 6.18 is now available for download, as announced today by Linus Torvalds himself, featuring enhanced hardware support through new and updated drivers, improvements to file systems and networking, and more.
Highlights of Linux 6.18 include the removal of the Bcachefs file system, support for the Rust Binder driver, a new dm-pcache device-mapper target to enable persistent memory as a cache for slower block devices, and a new microcode= command-line option to control the microcode loader's behavior on x86 platforms.
Linux kernel 6.18 also extends the support for file handles to kernel namespaces, implements initial 'block size > page size' support for the Btrfs file system, adds PTW feature detection on new hardware for LoongArch KVM, and adds support for running the kernel as a guest on FreeBSD's Bhyve hypervisor.
I wonder (Score:2)
How they keep track of the differences between 6.18 and 6.17.
Do they consider it a "big" difference? What IS considered a "big" difference?
It's amazing to me that they can keep track of all this shit at all, to be honest. So much detail and specificity!!!
Geniuses, all of them.
Re: (Score:2)
Corollary: the older I get, the dumber I feel.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Looks like an abbreviated version. I wonder what is in the 0.0057142857143 OR SO that they are leaving out.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm holding out for version 6.28, otherwise known as Two Pi
otherwise known as Tau
Re: (Score:2)
How they keep track of the differences between 6.18 and 6.17.
The git commit history, perchance?
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Holistically, not technically.
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Informative)
1. Jonathan Corbet founder of lwn.net and maintainer of the linux documentation subsystem, publishes regular articles; the "Merge window, part 1" (early in the cycle) from lwn contains the highlights https://lwn.net/Articles/10402... [lwn.net] ; after the kernel is released, Corbet publishes "Development statistics": how many changesets and changed lines, most active contributors and employers, number of bugs fixed and number of bugs introduced in each past versions, commits that fix the largest number of bugs. See last edition for 6.17 https://lwn.net/Articles/10383... [lwn.net]
2. Linus Thorvalds always comments about how large is each -rc version:
* 6.18-rc6 "So we have a slightly larger rc6 than usual, but I think it's just the random noise and a result of pull request timings rather than due to any issues with the release.
* 6.18-rc5 "it all looks just the way I like it at this point: small and boring."
3. Kernelnewbies.org does a great job of finding out the "Prominent features" of each release. See here for 6.18 https://kernelnewbies.org/Linu... [kernelnewbies.org]
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Holistically, not technically.
Hey, technically correct is the best kind of correct!
Re: I wonder (Score:4, Informative)
All of the headline changes go in during a two-week window at the start of the cycle, having been developed previously. Several people write articles during that window about what got merged, so the list is already known when the release actually comes out two months later. (That two-month period is used for testing in more unusual situations and checking for incompatibilities among the set of changes that got merged for the cycle.)
So this article is really reporting that two compact weeks of merge decisions in early October are now officially considered tested and ready, and they wrote the article and people checked it over a while ago now.
The part that's harder to track is ongoing development work, which happens continuously without a set schedule, but it happens in separate trees and only goes into the official tree when it's complete, has been reviewed, and has gone through various testing in systems managed by kernel developers. All of the work described here was done before 6.17 was released, and developed during several releases before that, but it didn't need to affect Linus's tree until he decided it would land in 6.18.