Linux 6.18-rc4 Released: "None Of It Looks Particularly Scary"

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 2 November 2025 at 02:54 PM EST. 11 Comments

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.18-rc4 as the latest weekly test release. Linux 6.18 is looking to be in good shape for potentially releasing on-time at the end of November otherwise the first week of December.

Linux 6.18-rc4 is appearing to be in good shape though thee a few changes worth mentioning for the week. Linux 6.18-rc4 has an assortment of small graphics driver fixes, new AMD Zen 6 model IDs and fixing Zen 5 RDSEED handling/workaround, and fixing a performance regression in the power management code.

👁 Linux 6.18-rc4 Git tag

Linus Torvalds wrote just now in the 6.18-rc4 announcement:

"I'm cutting rc4 a couple of hours early, because I am about to get on a plane for conference travel. But things look calm and pretty normal, and I'm traveling with my laptop, so apart from slight timing oddities that shouldn't affect anything.

Last week in fact felt *so* calm that I was surprised to notice that rc4 isn't really smaller than usual: all the stats look very normal, both in number of changes and where the changes are. The bulk is driver fixes, with - as is the norm - gpu, networking and sound driver leading the charge.

The non-driver changes are pretty spread out: we've got core networking, we've got filesystems (smb, xfs and nfsd), and we've got core kernel (sched_ext) and architecture fixes (s390 and x86).

And some new selftests for the issues found (mainly vfio).

None of it looks particularly scary, and a lot of it is trivial one-and few-liners."

There are many exciting features and changes with Linux 6.18 to look forward to using this holiday season.