It’s here; Linux 6.18 is officially released, delivering another sizeable set of performance gains, new hardware support and a controversial goodbye.
Linus Torvalds announced Linux 6.18’s release on the Linux Kernel Mailing List on November 30, 2025, noting that he’d “…have been happier with slightly less bugfixing noise in this last week of the release [there] was nothing that made me feel like this needs more time to cook.”
But since everything looks good, “6.18 is tagged and pushed out.”
As releases go this is a big-ish one — not because it saw more commits than the Linux 6.17 release (it did) but, but because Linux 6.18 is likely to become the next Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel, which many cloud, enterprise and businesses opt to run.
Us desktop schmoes? We prefer the latest and greatest if we can get it, so preamble out of the way, onto to the key changes in this release that caught my eye.
Linux 6.18: Highlights
Linux Gaming Device Improvements
Gaming on Linux is bigger and better than ever thanks, in part, to Valve, Steam and the success of their Steam Deck handheld PC.
But other handheld gaming devices are available too – Linux 6.18 bolsters support for them.
A new dedicated hardware monitoring (HWMON) driver for GPD handheld gaming devices is included, which should mean those running Linux on devices like the GPD Win 4 and Win Max 2 benefit from improved fan control and sensor readings.
The ASUS ROG Ally (Xbox Ally) and Lenovo Legion Go 2 pick up fixes for ‘spurious’ interrupts and NVMe resume failures, so gaming on those devices ought to be a little less hassle going forward.
Out side of PCs, the audio jack on the Sony DualSense controller works properly under Linux 6.18. Plugging a headset into the controller will now work as expected, i.e., sound switches to the headphones, microphone works, speaker volume adjusted.
GPU, CPU & NPU Buffs
Starting with Linux 6.18, the open-source Nouveau graphic drivers will default to using the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) firmware on Turing and Ampere GPUs, as part of a broader clean-up. Power management tweaks also feature.
The intel_pstate driver is able to enable Hardware P-states (HWP) without Energy Performance Preference (EPP) limits when the new Dynamic Efficiency Control (DEC) feature is turned on, and better better scaling on Meteor Lake devices.
ARM Mali GPUs can use a new Rust DRM driver – though it’s not finished
Linux 6.18 ships with a new Rust DRM driver for Arm Mali GPUs, albeit an initial effort and not yet ready for prime-time usage.
A collaboration by Collabora, Arm and Google engineers, the driver is a “port of Panthor” that “exposes Panthor’s uAPI and name to userspace”. The aim is “to incrementally develop Tyr […] until it is consider to be in parity with Panthor feature-wise.” (sic).
A new Rocket accelerator driver for Rockchip SoCs features support for multiple NPU cores, dynamic frequency scaling, and support for the Linux AI accelerator framework. It could make Rockchip‑based boards better for AI/ML workloads without external GPUs.
Sheaves Shaves Sharing
Linux 6.18 arrives with “sheaves”. These are per‑CPU caches for slab allocations (which is a fancy way of saying each processor core now has its own stash of memory objects to ‘allocate’ and ‘free’).
Instead of CPUs fighting over a shared pool of memory object, each ‘sheaf’ can do its own thing. Faster memory management should mean snappier multitasking for everyone, not just for those running intensive server loads (although, especially for those).
Bcachefs Removed from Kernel 6.18
The biggest filesystem change in Linux 6.18 isn’t something that was added, but something that has been removed, namely bcachefs filesystem code. Anyone working on or experimenting with Bcachefs will need to compile it manually in Linux 6.18.
Why was Bcachefs removed from the Linux kernel?
Ostensibly because of issues in Bcachefs’ maintainer Kent Overstreet following proper development processes, rather than issues with the filesystem code. Overstreet continually submitted new features late, at the point at which the kernel code is in bug-fix only mode.
The approach irritated Torvalds to the point he marked Bcachefs code “externally maintained” in Linux 6.17, with plans to remove it wholesale in 6.18 – and he has.
Filesystem & Storage
Thankfully, there’s better news for fans of other filesystems.
exFAT optimisations deliver 16x speed-up in loading times on SD cards, USB drives, etc
Ubuntu users will benefit from small EXT4 tweaks in Linux 6.18, like ioctl support in tune2fs, support for 32‑bit reserved UID/GID ranges and the removal of legacy Kconfig options.
Use a lot of SD cards, USB drives and similar?
exFAT driver optimisations deliver a heft 16x speed-up in loading times. Elsewhere, FUSE is furnished with support for direct copies of memory ranges larger than 32 bits, boosting performance in copy operations.
XFS enables ‘online fsck’ by default, a feature previously considered experimental. This allows XFS to repair itself when the filesystem is mounted and in use.
Other tidbits: Btrfs filesystem gains ‘better parallelism’ for read-heavy workloads and support for block sizes greater than page size; while a new device-mapper target, dm-pcache, offers a “high-throughput, low-latency” persistent cache layer.
Improved Laptop & PC Hardware Support
Linux 6.18 brings initial support for haptic touchpads (where ‘clicks’ are simulated rather than mechanical). While Ubuntu support for Snapdragon X Elite laptops gets a boost thanks to a new EC driver for Lenovo’s ThinkPad T14s (Gen 6).
A new keyboard driver for Xiaomi Redmibook laptops gets function (Fn) and backlight keys working under Linux, along with the Xiaomi-specific AI button. Pressing this send a KEY_ASSISTANT keycode that desktops can respond to by opening an app, etc.
If you’re own an Alienware 16 Aurora, Alienware M, Alienware X, or Dell G series laptop you’ll be pleased to hear Linux 6.18’s WMI WMAX driver supports fan control, sensor reporting and per‑zone RGB lighting controls. HP Omen laptops gain fan control support in the HP WMI driver.
An array of ASUS motherboards are now supported by the Linux 6.18 HWMON driver, meaning more sensors should accurately report their readings when queried. These include the ROG STRIX X670E, X870-I, X870E-I, Z690-E and Z790E gaming Wifi models.
Similarly, HP Omen laptops gain fan control support in the HP WMI driver.
Beyond that, further work to support running Linux on Apple M2 Pro, Max, and Ultra chips. Although this work is incremental (and difficult) it’s another step toward full Linux usability on Apple Silicon-based laptops and PCs.
Notable Security Changes in Linux 6.18
Security in Linux 6.18 sees a broad set of improvements, including support for signing BPF programs, which means dynamically loaded code can be verified for integrity before it runs.
The audit subsystem is smarter and able to support multiple Linux Security Modules (LSMs) being enabled at the same time, making it easier to stack SELinux, AppArmor and other Linux security frameworks together.
And although Linux 6.18 disables TPM Bus Encryption by default, this doesn’t leave your laptop less secure as a result. Turns out the feature was broken and causing performance slowdowns. Ergo, faster laptop, and just as secure as it was.
Other changes
The networking subsystem sees boosts, with UDP receive performance bettered by as much as 47% owing to low-level optimisations which, primarily, are aimed at improving system resilience under DDoS conditions (letting it handle floods of UDP packets better).
Rust bindings have been expanded further to cover more important kernel APIs, and there’s an initial framework for USB driver Rust bindings (albeit no actual driver to use yet). Expect to even more Rust-related changes in Linux 6.19.
Beyond the highlights above, other notable changes in Linux 6.18 include:
- Scheduler improvements with ‘fairer’ NUMA balancing
- Swap subsystem revamp boosts throughput under memory pressure
- KVM support for Intel Dynamic Efficiency Control (DEC)
- TCP Accurate ECN support to improved network congestion control
- Namespace file descriptors make container management easier
- NFS server scalability via prototype disabling of I/O caching
For more detail on the release as whole read through the comprehensive merge report recaps (first half & second half) from LWN, or scan the thousands upon thousands of kernel commits on GitHub (with a coffee and a sleeping bag to hand).
Upgrade to Linux 6.18
Linux 6.18 is available for download from kernel.org as source, but you will need to compile that source code to enjoy the benefit. A good learning experience? Sure. A fun experience? Depends on your personality…
If you’re on a stable Ubuntu release you won’t get Linux 6.18 as an official update via the Ubuntu repositories, but there are unofficial (e.g., Canonical Mainline DEBs, third-party PPAs) sources available — not without caveats, mind.
Upgrading to a newer Linux kernel on Ubuntu using sources outside of the official repos comes with no guarantees, no support and potential security risks. Such kernels may lack Ubuntu-specific patches and drivers for Ubuntu certified hardware.
Ubuntu 26.04 daily builds will get Linux 6.18 as an update in the coming weeks, as Canonical’s kernel development policy now loops in versions which aren’t the target kernel for an eventual stable Ubuntu release (which for 26.04 is v6.19 or whatever comes after).