Linux Kernel 6.18.8 released
Linux Kernel 6.18.8 has been released, featuring several important bug fixes and performance enhancements.
One change that caught attention deals with virtual memory management during forks, specifically fixing how limits are handled for VMA (Virtual Memory Area) when using mremap operations, ensuring things stay properly unfaulted or faulted to keep potential security issues at bay. This was tackled head-on by Lorenzo Stoakes and has gone through extensive testing.
Then there's a patch aimed squarely at addressing a tricky spurious interrupt problem within the Renesas RZ/V2H(P) Interrupt Control Unit (ICU) driver. It seems this glitch happened during system resume from idle, messing with edge detection circuits in a way that unnecessarily flipped certain enable bits for interrupts. Developer Biju Das has now provided an update to clear specific status flags after modifying registers like the ICU_TSSRk as suggested by the hardware documentation.
Beyond these headline fixes, several smaller ones have also been integrated into this kernel release. These focus on tweaking details related to QCOM UFS (Universal Flash Storage) clock sequencing and lockdep handling for IIO device info_exist_locks,basically swapping out one call for a more streamlined alternative using mutex_init_with_key(). There's also some comment cleanup connected to the huge_pmd_unshare function.
It all points back to how dedicated the Linux kernel development community is, constantly refining this open-source workhorse with each new release.
Linux kernel 6.18.8 released
Linux kernel version 6.18.8 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.18.8.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.18.8.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.18.8.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.18.8/v6.18.7
