Linus Torvalds warns that the next Linux kernel, version 6.19, will likely be delayed by about a week. The founder of the Linux project writes that the upcoming development cycle will be affected by the annual Kernel Maintainers Summit and the holiday season, leaving less time for integration and testing.
The announcement coincided with the release of Linux 6.18-rc4, which Torvalds published slightly earlier than usual because he had to leave for conference trips. According to him, the development of Linux 6.18 is continuing smoothly and without major problems, so the final release is still expected at the end of November.
Although Torvalds described the past week as calm, the scope of the code changes is comparable to previous release candidates. Most of the work focused on improvements to drivers, with an emphasis on GPUs, network components, and sound cards.
In addition, changes were also made to the core of the network, to file systems such as smb, xfs, and nfsd, and to the kernel scheduler (sched_ext). Several corrections were also made for the s390 and x86 architectures. New self-tests were added, including for vfio (Virtual Function I/O). According to Torvalds, these are mainly minor technical adjustments that do not pose any risk to the stability of the kernel.
If development continues at this pace, the final version of Linux 6.18 will likely be released at the end of November, around November 30, 2025, according to Neowin. This means that an eighth release candidate does not appear to be necessary, unless unexpected problems arise.
After the official release, it will be up to the distribution managers to incorporate the kernel into their systems. For distributions such as Fedora or rolling releases such as Arch Linux, this will probably happen within a few weeks. More stable distributions, including Debian and Ubuntu, usually take more time and often wait until the next major release.
Looking ahead to Linux 6.19
Torvalds is also looking ahead to the next development cycle. He expects a slight delay for Linux 6.19, mainly due to two factors. First, the annual Kernel Maintainers Summit and associated travel activities during the merge window. And second, the holiday season, which falls later in the release.
He indicated that he will likely add an extra week to the development cycle to compensate for the loss of time. That plan may still change if the development of Linux 6.18 encounters unexpected delays.