Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, has announced a likely one-week delay for version 6.19 due to scheduling conflicts. The delay stems from the annual Kernel Maintainers Summit and the holiday season impacting the development cycle. This comes alongside the smooth progress of Linux 6.18, expected by the end of November.
Linus Torvalds released Linux 6.18-rc4 slightly earlier than usual, citing upcoming conference trips as the reason. He described the development of Linux 6.18 as proceeding smoothly without major issues, with the final version still anticipated at the end of November, potentially around November 30, 2025, according to reports from Neowin. The past week was calm, but the scope of code changes matched previous release candidates, focusing primarily on driver improvements for GPUs, network components, and sound cards.
Additional updates included modifications to the network core, file systems such as smb, xfs, and nfsd, and the kernel scheduler (sched_ext). Corrections were applied to the s390 and x86 architectures, while new self-tests were added for vfio (Virtual Function I/O). Torvalds noted these as minor technical adjustments that pose no risk to kernel stability, suggesting no need for an eighth release candidate unless unforeseen problems emerge.
Looking ahead, Torvalds expects a slight delay for Linux 6.19, attributing it to the annual Kernel Maintainers Summit during the merge window and the later holiday season. He plans to extend the development cycle by an extra week to account for the lost time, though this could adjust if Linux 6.18 faces delays. Another perspective highlights the delay arising from a high volume of pull requests and heavy workload with pending patches, pushing back the planned schedule. Following the official release, distributions like Fedora and Arch Linux may integrate it within weeks, while more stable ones like Debian and Ubuntu often wait for major updates.