Greg Kroah-Hartman Drops Three More Stable Kernel Releases
Linux 6.12.104, 6.18.45, and 7.1.9 land with heavy networking and security patches.
Greg Kroah-Hartman pushed out three more stable Linux kernel updates today. If you maintain a longterm branch or ride the 7.1 stable line, there is a patch for you. The releases zero in on networking stability, Thunderbolt peripheral validation, and BPF reference counting races.
Stable kernels typically trickle in a few at a time. Greg probably skipped dinner on Friday to drop 6.12.104, 6.18.45, and 7.1.9 on the same day. Each build carries roughly 180 to 272 patches. These are maintenance snapshots backported from mainline, not feature drops.
Thunderbolt vulnerabilities rarely make the front page. They sit quietly in the background until a malicious dock tries to read your RAM. The coordinated push this weekend means the kernel team was chasing something specific.
What actually changed across all three
The shared patches tell you where the developers have been sweating. Every release includes five SCTP protocol stack patches to stop use-after-free crashes during peer restarts. You also get identical Thunderbolt bounds checking fixes for the group_reserved[] array and DROM dual link port validation. Those DROM fixes came straight from Bryam Vargas at hexlabsecurity, which is a nice touch for hardware attack surface hardening. The BPF subsystem got the same attention. Concurrent sendmsg() calls on the same socket were tripping over each other in sockmap and TCP iterator paths. Fixed now.
The 6.12.104, 6.18.45, and 7.1.9 breakdown
Linux 6.12.104 sits at around 180 patches. Networking leads the charge with 16 fixes, including out-of-bounds writes in IPVS NAT ICMP handling and UDP tunnel segmentation issues. Hardware monitoring drivers picked up seven patches for overflow protection. If you run 32-bit virtualization workloads, the vhost/vdpa patch that rejects overflowing PA map page counts is worth your attention.
The 6.18.45 release brings roughly 250 patches to the longterm branch that launched in November 2025. OVN and Open Virtual Switch virtual networking claim nine patches. XDP socket paths got another six. The ARM64 architecture round adds seven processor-specific fixes. Not bad for a Tuesday morning.
Linux 7.1.9 rounds out the trio with 272 patches. The 7.x line leans into scheduler work. Four major patches target sched_ext, fixing cgroup locking and sub-scheduler teardown sequences. The USB subsystem pulled in seven patches, most notably an xHCI CRC mask correction that finally uses BIT_ULL for proper 64-bit handling. Btrfs stability and correctness improvements came through alongside eleven hardware monitoring driver safety fixes. The 11-patch block for the new Broadcom bnge driver also made its debut here.
The security angle
Use-after-free conditions still dominate the vulnerability class distribution, sitting around 15 patches in 6.12.104 and roughly 10 each across the other two. Out-of-bounds access from malformed Thunderbolt devices is the kind of hardware attack surface that absolutely deserves attention. SCTP fixes address authenticated peer triggers, which limits the blast radius but does not eliminate denial-of-service risk. BPF reference counting races matter mostly for containerized workloads and eBPF-based network policies. Server management interfaces will benefit from the hwmon hardening.
Linux kernel 6.12.104 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.104 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.12.104.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.12.104.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.12.104.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.12.104/v6.12.103
Linux kernel 6.18.45 released
Linux kernel version 6.18.45 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.18.45.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.18.45.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.18.45.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.18.45/v6.18.44
Linux kernel 7.1.9 released
Linux kernel version 7.1.9 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v7.x/linux-7.1.9.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v7.x/patch-7.1.9.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v7.x/linux-7.1.9.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v7.1.9/v7.1.8
