Linus Torvalds has tagged and released Linux 6.18-rc1, the first test build of the upcoming kernel. After two weeks of merges, Torvalds described this cycle as an ordinary, smooth window with no serious issues.
In his release note, Torvalds called the 6.18 merge window “one of the good merge windows,” saying he did not need to bisect any problems on his test machines. He added that the release size sits “right in the middle of the pack,” a typical level for an rc1.
Roughly half of the code changes involve drivers. The rest span the virtual-file-system layer, filesystems, architecture updates — many of them DeviceTree-related — as well as tooling and continued Rust integration.
The merged work covers nearly every major subsystem:
- VFS / filesystems: updates from Al Viro, Christian Brauner, Amir Goldstein, Andreas Gruenbacher, David Sterba, and Ted Ts’o.
- Drivers: changes across graphics (DRM), sound, USB and Thunderbolt, TTY, staging, and hardware monitoring (Greg Kroah-Hartman, Takashi Iwai, Guenter Roeck).
- Architectures: updates for x86, arm64, RISC-V, s390, powerpc, sparc, parisc, MIPS, LoongArch, NIOS2, Xtensa, OpenRISC, and UML.
- Tooling: perf, tracing, kselftest, kunit, documentation, and nolibc improvements from Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo, Steven Rostedt, Shuah Khan, Jonathan Corbet, and Thomas Weißschuh.
- Security and hardening: SELinux, LSM, integrity, seccomp, and hardening fixes from Paul Moore and Kees Cook.
- Other areas: BPF (Alexei Starovoitov), IOMMU / VFIO / RDMA (Joerg Roedel, Alex Williamson, Jason Gunthorpe), virtualization (KVM, Xen, Hyper-V), power management and ACPI (Rafael Wysocki), Devicetree (Rob Herring), CXL (Dave Jiang), and peripheral subsystems such as I²C, GPIO, RTC, and watchdog.
The file-system and storage layers also received routine updates across btrfs, ext4, xfs, f2fs, zonefs, NFS, SMB, Ceph, OrangeFS, exFAT, erofs, gfs2, udf, quota, hfs, and hpfs.
Torvalds’s brief summary reflects a healthy start to the 6.18 cycle: balanced contributions, no regressions in early testing, and an overall calm development phase.
Linux 6.18-rc1 is now available for download and testing. Further release candidates will follow as the kernel moves toward its final 6.18 release.
Source: Linus Torvalds — “Linux 6.18-rc1” announcement email, Oct 12, 2025
