Linus Torvalds announced Linux kernel 6.18 on the last Sunday of November 2025, marking the final release of the year. The kernel has been officially designated as a long-term support version, with maintenance promised until December 2027. It includes various hardware improvements, file system enhancements, and new features like the Rust Binder driver.
The Linux 6.18 kernel arrived as the last major release of 2025, announced by Linus Torvalds on the last Sunday of November. This version is highly likely to serve as the next long-term support (LTS) kernel, a status now officially confirmed on kernel.org with support extending until December 2027.
Key changes include the removal of the experimental bcachefs file system, which was added in kernel 6.7 and is now maintained externally through repositories for distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, and NixOS. Several file systems received updates: XFS now supports checking and repairing volumes while in use, beneficial for large server storage; the exFAT driver is 16 times faster for some operations on microSD cards and USB keys; Btrfs has more parallel processing; ext4 includes functional improvements; FUSE is faster; and NFSv4 caching can be fully disabled.
Hardware support expanded notably. Handheld devices from ASUS, Lenovo, and GamePad Digital gained updated drivers, alongside Sony's DualSense controller. Dell Alienware, HP Omen, and ASUS ROG motherboards received monitoring tweaks and better keyboard/trackpad handling. A new dm-pcache feature enables persistent memory as a high-throughput cache for SSDs and disks. The Nouveau driver for Nvidia GPUs now uses GSP firmware for Turing and Ampere families, improving power management. A preliminary Rust driver supports Arm's Mali GPUs, and there's new backing for Rockchip's NPU and Apple's M2 SoCs via the Asahi Linux project. Support for RISC-V and Loongson architectures also improved.
Other additions encompass a Rust implementation of the Binder inter-process communication system, originally from BeOS and used in Android; detection for running under FreeBSD's bhyve hypervisor; pidfd extensions for kernel namespaces; AccECN protocol support; preliminary eBPF program signing; and sheaves for RAM storage management. The kernel is rolling out to distributions like Arch Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Fedora, with potential inclusion in Ubuntu 26.04. Meanwhile, maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the end of life for the Linux 5.4 series after over six years.
