Version 6.18 of the Linux kernel is here

"On the last Sunday of November, Linus Torvalds announced Linux 6.18, the kernel that Ari Lemmke named after him in 1991. It's the last kernel release of the year, and that means it is highly likely 6.18 will be the next Long Term Support (LTS) kernel. As usual, there are lots of new drivers and improved support for multiple kinds of hardware. There are also many changed and refined features, but not many big exciting new ones."

"The most visible change in 6.18 is that Linus removed the experimental bcachefs file system that was added in kernel 6.7 almost two years ago and relegated to being externally maintained in September. The bcachefs project now has external repositories to install the file system's DKMS modules on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE listed on the project homepage, and mentions that it's included in Arch and NixOS. Aside from that, there's been little news for the last couple of months."

"XFS volumes can now be checked and repaired while in use - especially handy for vast server storage volumes for which an offline check takes so long that it means taking machines offline for extended periods. The exFAT driver, used on microSD cards and USB keys in many roles, is now 16 times faster at some operations. The Btrfs code is more parallel in places, ext4 has some functional improvements, the FUSE module for non-kernel file systems is now faster, and there are improvements in cache handling."

Linux 6.18 was released at the end of November and is likely to become the next Long Term Support (LTS) kernel. The release removes the experimental bcachefs filesystem and the bcachefs project now provides external DKMS repositories for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE, with inclusion noted for Arch and NixOS. Several kernel-supported filesystems received enhancements: XFS gains online check-and-repair, exFAT shows major speedups, Btrfs increases parallelism, ext4 gets functional tweaks, and FUSE becomes faster. Cache handling improved and NFSv4 shared volumes can have caching disabled. New hardware drivers were also added.

Read at Theregister