Linux kernel Creator Linus Torvalds has delayed the Linux Kernel 4.18 release likely a week delay instead seeing a 4.18-rc8 test release.
Step of reverting a kernel release candidate – after it went sour- because of last minute Issues.
A late regression in the VMA (Virtual Memory Area)code has caused IA64 not to boot with Linux 4.18. Linus is going to revert the change causing that breakage in the memory management code. But he notes that he will likely do a 4.18-rc8 change due to that glaring issue and other last minute changes.
He said
I think I’ll do an rc8 with the revert, just so that we’ll have some time to figure this out. It’s only Tuesday, but I already have 90 commits since rc7, so this isn’t the only issue we’re having.
I _prefer_ just the regular cadence of releases, but when I have a reason to delay, I’ll delay.
Reason fo Delay –
The biggest problem is with ashmem(Anonymous Shared Memory), an application-level virtual memory area type introduced to the Linux kernel to solve a problem arising from Android’s security paranoia.
ashmem Created to let apps share memory without leaking resources and prevent malicious programs to do anything in /temp basically “obtain memory that can be shared with peer processes without creating resource leaks.”
In other words, ashmem can be used by programs to share information without going through a temporary file system.
Which cause open source flavor of android user space crash because of change in memory management code .
Linus Torvalds Said
Honestly, by now we just need to revert that commit.It’s not even clear that it was a good idea to begin with. The rest of the commits were cleanups, this one was driven by a incorrect VM_BUG_ON() that triggered, and that checked “vma_is_anonymous(vma)” without any explanations of wht it should matter.
I think the biggest problem with vma_is_anonymous() may be its name, not what it does.
What the code historically *did* (and what vma_is_anonymous() checks) is not “is this anonymous”, but rather “does this have any special operations associated with it”.
So now we have another release candidate Linux 4.18-rc8 next Sunday, 5 August, and the official release then the following Sunday on 12 August.