Greg Kroah-Hartman released six LTS kernel versions simultaneously on Friday, July 24, 2026, ranging from 5.10.261 to 6.18.40. The stable review cycle featured up to 1,624 patches for the newest branch, accompanied by the 7.1.5 point release and 7.2-rc4 mainline candidate. Security remains the priority, with critical fixes for KVM/x86 shadow paging (CVE-2026-46113), XFS data corruption, and a BPF/s390 verifier mismatch flagged as a regression. All source tarballs are available at kernel.org, with distribution vendors expected to integrate the patches into their trees shortly.
Six LTS kernel branches drop at once as Greg Kroah-Hartman tackles the July stable cycle
Greg Kroah-Hartman wrapped up the July stable review cycle on Friday, pushing six long-term support kernel versions to production in a single sitting. If you're running servers, workstations, or anything that needs a reliable Linux base, you've got some home updates to install.
The patch counts alone are enough to make your head spin. We're looking at 674 patches for the 5.10 branch, 1,226 for 6.6, and a massive 1,624 patches for the newest LTS line, 6.18.40. Not bad for a Friday afternoon. Greg hasn't been this prolific since the 2023 memory shortage forced him to consolidate release trains. At the time of that last major push, the patch counts were running about half this size. But in the months since, the BPF and networking stacks have accumulated enough friction to justify a heavier review cycle.
Security fixes and subsystem updates
This cycle leans hard into security. The headline vulnerability is CVE-2026-46113, a shadow paging use-after-free bug in KVM/x86 that scores an 8.8 on CVSS. It affects kernel 5.15 and earlier, and it triggers when guest page tables shift between VM entries. The fix is straightforward in theory: check the target GFN and zap existing mappings before laying down new ones.
XFS got its own dose of paranoia. CVE-2026-64600 addresses a data fork mapping issue that can cause incorrect refcount btree lookups during direct I/O. On the s390 architecture, a verifier/JIT mismatch allows BPF programs to slip code outside the guest context. Greg flagged it as both a regression and a security issue in the July 24 LKML thread, and he noted that the 6.18 branch is seeing the most active development of the lot, which explains the massive patch volume.
Beyond the security bulletins, the stable trees picked up fixes across nearly every major subsystem. The schedutil cpufreq governor now accepts a sampling_down_factor up to 100,000, giving power management finer control under heavy load. Memory reclaim in mm/vmscan finally stops evicting file pages when swappiness hits max. Network paths got tightened with hard byte lifetime enforcement in xfrm_input(), and the wireless stack gets TX flow control improvements for ath11k and ath12k adapters. There's also a growing pile of patches for Rust DMA abstractions and basic serial device bus abstractions, keeping the kernel's Rust subsystem momentum rolling.
Where to grab them
All six LTS tarballs are sitting in the usual spot complete with PGP signatures and incremental patch files:
Linux kernel 5.10.261 released
Linux kernel version 5.10.261 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.10.261.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/patch-5.10.261.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.10.261.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v5.10.261/v5.10.260
Linux kernel 5.15.212 released
Linux kernel version 5.15.212 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.15.212.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/patch-5.15.212.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.15.212.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v5.15.212/v5.15.211
Linux kernel 6.1.178 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.178 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.1.178.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.1.178.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.1.178.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.1.178/v6.1.177
Linux kernel 6.6.145 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.145 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.6.145.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.6.145.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.6.145.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.6.145/v6.6.144
Linux kernel 6.12.97 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.97 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.12.97.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.12.97.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.12.97.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.12.97/v6.12.96
Linux kernel 6.18.40 released
Linux kernel version 6.18.40 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.18.40.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.18.40.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.18.40.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.18.40/v6.18.39
