Linux 4.18-rc1 Kernel Released

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 16 June 2018 at 07:29 PM EDT. 3 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
Coming out one day ahead of schedule is the Linux 4.18-rc1 kernel.

Linus Torvalds decided to cut the 4.18-rc1 release one day ahead of the normal two-week long merge window, thereby also marking the end to new feature work to be merged for Linux 4.18.

Linus Torvalds closed the merge window early since he's currently in Japan and will be on a boat / scuba diving on Sunday. He wrote of 4.18-rc1, "this release looks fairly regular - both in size and in behavior. We actually have managed to shrink things a bit more this release too, as people have clearly gotten excited about the whole 'let's remove old unused code'. It's not nearly as noticeable as it was for 4.17, but rc1 has actually caused a bit of shrinkage:"

Linux 4.18 is another exciting cycle with a lot of graphics driver improvements, excitement on the I/O front, and some more controversial work like merging Fscrypt Speck support and dropping the Lustre file-system from mainline.

My original feature overview on the prominent Linux 4.18 kernel changes will be up shortly and our usual kernel benchmarks coming up soon.

When running some stats on the Linux Git tree as of this Saturday night, from v4.17 to v4.18-rc1 there are 12479 files changed, 560339 insertions(+), 667549 deletions(-). So the Linux 4.18 kernel at this stage is about 107k lines of code lighter, thanks to the removal of Lustre and other clean-ups particularly in the staging area.

Lastly, some numbers when running CLOC on the Git tree as of 4.18-rc1 for some code statistics:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                  files          blank        comment           code
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
C                         25781        2552992        2246815       12960039
C/C++ Header              18700         485302         895440        3632968
Assembly                   1317          47194         106079         232658
JSON                        189              0              0         102201
make                       2378           8726           9436          37706
Perl                         55           5415           3995          27298
Bourne Shell                345           5616           4979          24409
Python                      108           3057           3335          17418
HTML                          5            669              0           5492
yacc                          9            700            375           4640
PO File                       5            791            918           3061
lex                           8            326            314           2007
C++                           7            285             77           1837
Bourne Again Shell           51            350            317           1710
awk                          11            170            155           1384
Markdown                      1            220              0           1077
TeX                           1            108              3            915
Glade                         1             58              0            603
NAnt script                   2            157              0            601
Windows Module Definition     2             14              0            102
m4                            1             15              1             95
XSLT                          5             13             26             61
CSS                           1             18             27             44
vim script                    1              3             12             27
Ruby                          1              4              0             25
INI                           1              1              0              6
sed                           1              2              5              5
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                      48987        3112206        3272309       17058389
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week