Linus Torvalds, as usual, has published this news in the Linux Kernel Mailing List or LKML. Yes, Linux 4.18 rc5 is ready, that is, the fifth release of a Release Candidate or candidate for a final version, therefore the launch of the final and stable version of the Linux kernel 4.18. And it comes with interesting improvements and updates that we can enjoy from now on if you want to get hold of this RC or wait until the end of this branch.
Like own Torvalds has indicated in his mail, This week of development has been very intense, although it seems that it is something else different when we see what has happened in rc5. However, that intensive development work has not been a problem and things are progressing as planned and there have been no problems. The stress problem was only due to a bug in VM that turned out to be solved with two simple lines of code and led to an error message («Kernel BUG mm / page_alloc.c«) or frozen virtual machine in some cases... The RC5 does not contain major revolutions in its code or major changes, but it does contain many small fixes to improve what already exists. Among the collection of patches and improvements implemented in its code are improvements for a third of the kernel drivers (USB, ATA, mmc, Sound, ...), some updates for the ARM64 architecture, and other tools present in the kernel.
There are also changes in other architectures such as MIPS and AMD64, the file systems or FS, and other changes that can be included among the patches belonging to the miscellaneous category, that is, VM, timing, etc. In addition to that, the code has been cleaned up and many more bugs and improvements that you can see in the changelog ...