Greg Kroah-Hartman released Linux kernel stable updates 7.1.4, 6.18.39, and 6.12.96 today, pushing 357 to 534 commits per branch across the active stable and long-term support trees. The batch prioritizes critical security patches, heavily targeting FUSE and io_uring race conditions, XFS filesystem integrity, and touchscreen driver buffer overflows. Maintainers are also quietly relying on AI-assisted auditing tools like LOLM and Claude to surface edge-case bugs that would otherwise slip through code review. 

Greg Kroah-Hartman Pushes Three Linux Kernel Stable Updates Simultaneously

Linux 7.1.4, 6.18.39, and 6.12.96 hit the stable trees today, packing heavy FUSE and XFS fixes alongside a quiet but growing reliance on AI-assisted code auditing.

The weekly stable release cycle just hit its usual Friday rhythm again. Greg Kroah-Hartman tagged Linux 7.1.4, 6.18.39, and 6.12.96 this morning, with commit counts ranging from 357 to 534 depending on the branch. If you maintain a distro that tracks stable trees, you already know what this means. It’s a routine sync, but this round feels noticeably heavier on security patches than usual. The FUSE and io_uring subsystems took the biggest hit, with over a dozen fixes targeting use-after-free conditions, NULL dereferences, and race conditions that could leave syscall threads stuck in D-state indefinitely.

XFS also saw a substantial update from Darrick Wong. Twelve patches landed for the filesystem, and notably, several were flagged by an AI-assisted audit tool called LOLM. We’re seeing this pattern more often across the stable pipeline now. Chris Mason and other contributors also explicitly credited Claude and Codex for parts of the FUSE-uring work. It’s a quiet shift in how kernel maintainers approach edge-case bug hunting. Not exactly a revolution. Just a faster way to find stack overflows before they hit production boxes.

The input subsystem got a major pass from Dmitry Torokhov, and security researcher Bryam Vargas of hexlabsecurity contributed five patches focused on bounding device-reported values. Touchscreen drivers like Goodix, Synaptics RMI4, and MMS114 all got hard bounds checks after malicious controllers could previously trigger stack or heap overflows. It’s tedious to patch hardware edge cases. Necessary, though.

What’s Actually New in Each Branch

The 7.1.4 tree carries 534 commits and sits at the head of the current stable line. Linux 6.18.39 follows closely behind with 496 commits as the active LTS branch. Both trees share nearly identical core fixes—XFS integrity work, FUSE race conditions, RDMA memory bounds, and the I2C adapter deregistration patch from Johan Hovold. The overlap is expected. Stable trees pull from the same backporting pipeline, so you won’t find entirely new code here, just careful cherry-picking and rebasing.

Linux 6.12.96 landed with 357 commits. Fewer patches here simply reflect code drift. Some fixes that applied cleanly to 7.1 and 6.18 need manual surgery for the older 6.12 tree, and others were already merged in earlier 6.12.x drops. That’s the natural aging curve for an LTS branch. You’ll also find the F2FS page cache race revert that Zhaoyang Huang pulled to stop kernel panics on nearly full partitions. The scheduler gets a CPU affinity load balancing tweak from Adam Li, and the timekeeping layer fixes a raw spinlock versus sleeping mutex context issue for jiffies registration. Small stuff. The kind of things that keep servers from tripping over themselves at 3 a.m.

Linux kernel 7.1.4 released

Linux kernel version 7.1.4 is now available:

Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v7.x/linux-7.1.4.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v7.x/patch-7.1.4.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v7.x/linux-7.1.4.tar.sign

You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v7.1.4/v7.1.3

Linux kernel 6.18.39 released

Linux kernel version 6.18.39 is now available:

Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.18.39.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.18.39.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.18.39.tar.sign

You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.18.39/v6.18.38

Linux kernel 6.12.96 released

Linux kernel version 6.12.96 is now available:

Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.12.96.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.12.96.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.12.96.tar.sign

You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.12.96/v6.12.95