14 DAY TRIAL // A day early than expected, Linus Torvalds kicked off the development cycle of the next kernel series, Linux 4.18, with the release of the first RC (Release Candidate) milestone.
The Linux 4.18 kernel series promises to be more light than previous branches as it does away with even more of that old, unused code than Linux kernel 4.17 did, which removed support for eight hardware architectures. One of the things removed in this release is the Lustre parallel distributed file system, as well as a few hardware drivers.
"We actually have managed to shrink things a bit more this release too," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement. "The removal of Lustre may not be all that notable, because it does look like a lot of the development has been happening out of tree, which may be why it never really ended up working as well as people hoped in the staging tree."
Linux kernel 4.18 will hit the streets in August 2018
Apart from all the code removal, the Linux 4.18 kernel series also promises to bring lots of bug fixes and some new, exciting features, all of which will be revealed when the final release hits the streets in early August. Depending on how many Release Candidate milestone will be released, Linux kernel 4.18 could arrive on August 5 or August 12, 2018.
Until then, you can study the shortlog attached to Linus Torvalds' mailing list announcement to find out what changes landed in the first Release Candidate of Linux kernel 4.18, which you can download right now from kernel.org and install it on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution. However, please keep in mind not to replace your stable kernel packages with it, nor use it in production environments.