Greg Kroah-Hartman shipped two coordinated stable Linux kernel updates today, tagging 7.2.13 and 6.18.59 within eight minutes of each other. Neither release adds features, but both bundle bug-fix and security patches focused on SMB/CIFS/NTFS data corruption, heap overflows, and use-after-free bugs. The 7.2.13 update rides the newest mainline series, while 6.18.59 is the LTS track supported through at least December 2027. Both deliver overlapping fixes, keeping cutting-edge and production deployments patched on the same schedule.

Two stable Linux kernels ship in one afternoon: 7.2.13 and 6.18.59

Greg Kroah-Hartman tagged the Linux 7.2.13 and 6.18.59 stable updates within eight minutes of each other today, and both arrive with nearly the same story. Neither one adds features. Both are bug-fix and security snapshots, and a healthy chunk of the changes target the exact same classes of bugs.

That the pair landed on the same day is a small but neat illustration of how the kernel runs two lifecycles at once. One of these is the newest code. The other is what a lot of production systems actually run. Understanding the split matters more than it should, so let's get through it.

A kernel version like 7.2.13 is three numbers that describe two very different pieces of software. The first pair (7.2 vs. 6.18) tells you which track you're on. The last digit is the patch, applied on roughly a two-week cycle by stable maintainers with testing help from engineers at Debian, Fedora, Red Hat, SUSE, and Collabora.

Odd minor numbers like 7.2 are short-lived development tracks. Even ones like 6.18 are LTS, meaning they stick around for years instead of months. That's the difference between "the newest fixes" and "the fixes we promise to keep shipping."

Keep in mind that 7.2.13 rides on Linux 7.2, which Linus Torvalds released on August 16. It's the current series, so its patches lean toward the newest regressions in fast-moving subsystems.

Linux 7.2.13

The changelog is roughly 8,725 lines. The loudest cluster lands in network file sharing.

There's a pair of SMB client fixes that flush in-flight direct and async I/O before truncating a file on O_TRUNC, which stops stale data from being written back past the new end of the file. There's a heap-overflow patch in cifs_do_set_acl(), where an ACL that passed one size check could still overflow when converted to the larger CIFS wire format. And a couple of fixes reject SetEA requests that don't fit the buffer, closing a slab out-of-bounds write on SMB1 mounts.

ksmbd gets work zeroing response buffers to stop information leaks, and NTFS eats a whole list of smaller bugs: a memmove overlap, an undefined behavior issue in MFT record size calculation, wrong record pointers, and signal handling in fallocate.

The rest of the bundle is the usual memory-safety and hardening fare. A KVM fix handles the SS bit appearing in page-fault error codes, a scenario that trips up Hyper-V on Windows 11. There's an io_uring change from Microsoft Security FORGE Labs that stops an unprivileged user from making an exiting task burn CPU indefinitely, which the changelog notes can crash the kernel under panic_on_warn.

Not cheap, and not entirely surprising for a patch cycle. Still, a day's work that keeps data corruption and remote/local attack surfaces down is exactly the point of stable releases.

Linux kernel 7.2.13 released

Linux kernel version 7.2.13 is now available:

Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v7.x/linux-7.2.13.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v7.x/patch-7.2.13.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v7.x/linux-7.2.13.tar.sign

You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v7.2.13/v7.2.12

Linux 6.18.59

The parent 6.18 series came out on November 30, 2025, and Greg promoted it to LTS on December 3. Support runs through at least December 2027. This changelog is around 7,175 lines, and a lot of it mirrors 7.2.13 because the same fixes were backported.

What's distinct here includes an Intel ice Ethernet driver fix that restores Rx on virtual functions broken by a Page Pool conversion, plus a crash fix in the ethtool offline loopback test. There's a VSOCK/VMCI/virtio source-validation patch that stops an attacker from redirecting packets to the wrong socket, and a clever one: ipv4: udp now creates exceptions before socket matching, which mitigates an off-path side-channel attack that could otherwise leak a UDP socket's ephemeral port.

The overlap is the real insight. It's evidence of the stable process funneling the same critical fixes into every active tree so both bleeding-edge and long-term deployments get patched at once.

Linux kernel 6.18.59 released

Linux kernel version 6.18.59 is now available:

Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.18.59.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.18.59.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.18.59.tar.sign

You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.18.59/v6.18.58

Why the two-at-once thing keeps happening

For someone running the newest series, 7.2.13 brings fixes aimed at the latest scheduler, GPU, and networking code. The cache-aware task scheduling and the "fairer" GPU scheduler introduced in 7.2 are the headline performance items, so those patches matter most if you're gaming or pushing high-performance workloads.

If you run an enterprise or cloud deployment, you've deliberately stuck to LTS for stability, and 6.18.59 hands you the same class of integrity fixes on a base you've committed to for the next twenty months or so.

One aside worth flagging: 6.18 is also the kernel that pulled Bcachefs out of mainline. As of this series, that filesystem isn't built in anymore and lives only as an out-of-tree DKMS module. It's a decision that still sparks argument, and it's the kind of thing that shows up less in patch cycles than in the feature releases that spawn them.