Linux 6.18: All About The New Long-term Support Linux Kernel

Linus Torvalds wasn’t thrilled pinch really nan last days starring up to nan 6.18 merchandise of nan Linux kernel went. “I’d person been happier pinch somewhat little bugfixing noise successful this past week of nan release,” nan Linux kernel creator wrote Nov. 30 connected nan Linux kernel mailing list.

Nevertheless, he added, “While there’s a fewer much fixes than I would dream for, location was thing that made maine consciousness for illustration this needs much clip to cook. So 6.18 is tagged and pushed out.”

Now that type 6.18 is afloat cooked, what are nan ingredients? And what, exactly, does “long-term support” mean erstwhile it comes to nan Linux kernel?

Once upon a time, semipermanent support versions of nan Linux kernel sewage six years of semipermanent support (LTS). That’s nary longer nan case. In 2023, nan kernel developers trim LTS to 2 years.

Why? Because Linux codification maintainers person been burning out. It’s a difficult job. And, arsenic Josef Bacik, Linux kernel record strategy developer and maintainer, said successful a position astatine nan 2022 Linux Storage | Filesystem | MM & BPF Summit, “Maintainers are burning retired [because] maintainers don’t scale.” Adding reproach to injury, they are besides rarely paid for attraction work.

So it is that we only get 2 years of “official” LTS — and nan timepiece connected nan latest release, 6.18, began ticking connected Dec. 3, erstwhile unchangeable Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced it was officially nan newest LTS version. This merchandise besides sees nan LTS Linux 5.4 falling retired of support.

Longer Support for Enterprise Linux Distros

Wait? What’s that you say? You request a heck of a batch longer support clip than 2 years for you and your customers? Well, depending connected which distribution you usage for production, you’re successful luck. Many of nan apical endeavor Linux distributors connection acold longer-term support horizons for their paying customers.

Red Hat maintains its ain Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) kernels for nan distro’s life rhythm of 10-plus years. Red Hat does this by backporting information fixes and selected features to a changeless kernel version, moreover erstwhile upstream has dropped that branch. RHEL besides offers Extended Life Cycle/Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) add‑ons for older releases, which see kernel information updates beyond modular maintenance.

RHEL‑compatible distributions specified arsenic AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux way RHEL’s LTS kernels done their ain rebuilds, efficaciously extending kernel attraction for users connected nan aforesaid timelines arsenic nan corresponding RHEL releases.

OpenELA, nan RHEL-compatible Linux distribution backed by Oracle, SUSE and CIQ/Rocky Linux, besides supports older kernels via nan RHEL codification tree. In addition, OpenELA explicitly stepped successful to support nan erstwhile LTS Linux 4.14 until December 2024. Nevertheless, OpenELA was still releasing Linux 4.14 codification successful 2025.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) was besides supporting 4.14 connected Amazon Linux 2.0  done nan extremity of October 2025, and nan besides different obsolete 5.10 kernel done June 20, 2026.

SUSE maintains SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) kernels pinch agelong life cycles, akin to Red Hat, and offers extended support options. Starting pinch SLES 16 and its Linux 6.12 kernel, SUSE now offers 16 years of support.

Finally, Canonical maintains Ubuntu LTS kernels for up to 15 years pinch add‑on support packages. Canonical besides offers LTS for nan 4.14 and different out-of-date kernels. For example, nan institution still supports nan 11-and-a-half-year-old Ubuntu 14.04 distro.

Why should you usage either nan charismatic LTS kernel aliases its commercially supported twins? It’s simple. As Kroah-Hartman said successful a 2020 “Ask nan Expert” question and reply astatine Open Source Summit Europe, they supply developers pinch a unchangeable exertion binary interface (ABI). It besides provides, he’s said, a continuous stream of information patches. This is acold safer than freezing connected an aged non‑LTS kernel aliases trying to cherry‑pick fixes yourself.

What’s New successful Linux 6.18?

At nan halfway of 6.18 is simply a important upgrade to nan slab representation allocator successful nan shape of “sheaves.” This is simply a per‑CPU cache system that reduces contention and speeds up representation allocation and freeing operations. The merchandise besides includes improved swapping behaviour and different virtual instrumentality (VM) tweaks to amended capacity nether representation pressure, peculiarly connected engaged servers and desktops.

One of nan astir visible and arguable changes is nan removal of nan experimental Bcachefs record system from nan mainline kernel. Bcachefs is simply a general-purpose Linux filesystem. It’s designed for systems that request beardown information integrity and precocious retention features. In practice, it targets galore of nan aforesaid roles arsenic Btrfs aliases ZFS: ample section storage, multidisk arrays and setups that harvester SSDs and HDDs for capacity and capacity.

Bcachefs was booted retired of nan kernel mostly because its maintainer, Kent Overstreet, fought pinch kernel maintainers, including Torvalds, complete spot timing, reappraisal practices and nationalist communications. Behind nan individual arguments was a method one: The Bcachefas codification fixes often came successful late, kernel maintainers said, which fought pinch nan kernel’s penchant for stabilizing during merchandise campaigner phases.

Torvalds and different maintainers based on that codification that routinely needs that benignant of precocious churn does not yet beryllium upstream, particularly for thing arsenic captious arsenic a filesystem. Bcachefx is now shipped arsenic a Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS) module, which is maintained extracurricular nan kernel tree. Distributions that wish to support Bcachefs must build and vessel that outer module.

On nan networking side, Linux 6.18 adds support for Accurate Explicit Congestion Notification (AccECN) successful TCP. This enables finer‑grained congestion feedback and perchance amended throughput nether load. The kernel besides introduces PSP‑encrypted TCP connections, an attack that offers hardware‑friendly offload characteristics arsenic an replacement to accepted IPsec aliases TLS successful immoderate environments.

Security hardening continues pinch support for cryptographically signed BPF programs. This enables runtime-verified Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) payloads, arsenic good arsenic refinements crossed nan information subsystem and multi‑LSM configurations.

A notable infrastructure alteration is nan expertise to negociate process namespaces utilizing file‑handle‑like objects, akin successful tone to pidfds. This should make instrumentality runtimes and low‑level tooling much robust and race‑resistant.

Additionally, nan gradual integration of Rust into nan kernel continues, including support for a Rust Binder driver. This is simply a Google-driven rewrite of nan Android Binder driver successful Rust. This captious inter-process connection (IPC) strategy enables 2 processes connected an Android-powered instrumentality to pass pinch 1 another.

As pinch astir kernel releases, 6.18 carries a ample batch of caller and updated drivers crossed architectures, including x86_64, ARM, RISC‑V, and others. It besides — surprise! — improves support for caller GPUs, SoCs and retention controllers. It besides comes pinch fixes and enhancements for celebrated handheld gaming PCs specified arsenic nan Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go 2, arsenic good arsenic amended powerfulness guidance and device‑tree sum for laptops and embedded boards.

For extremity users, that translates into amended out‑of‑the‑box hardware support connected upcoming distributions that way nan caller LTS line.

For Linux desktop users — Jack Wallen and I activity — nan main benefits of Linux 6.18 will beryllium faster, much scalable representation allocation, improved web ratio and broader hardware enablement, particularly connected modern GPUs and newer ARM‑based systems.

Server operators and unreality providers are apt to attraction connected dm‑pcache for hybrid storage, nan caller TCP capabilities, and signed BPF infrastructure arsenic they measure 6.18 arsenic a long‑term platform. With support stretching to 2027 and nary azygous “killer” feature, Linux 6.18 positions itself arsenic a blimpish but foundational merchandise that galore distributions will standardize connected for nan adjacent fewer years.

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