Linus Torvalds formally released the Linux 3.18 kernel on December 7, even though a regression issue that first showed up in Linux 3.17 has yet to be resolved.
“I’d love to say that we’ve figured out the problem that plagues 3.17 for a couple of people, but we haven’t,” Torvalds wrote in his release announcement. ” At the same time, there’s absolutely no point in having everybody else twiddling their thumbs when a couple of people are actively trying to bisect an older issue, so holding up the release just didn’t make sense.”