Linux Kernel 7.2.4, 6.18.50, and 6.12.109 landed today, shipping roughly 1,650 commits across the current stable and longterm branches. The patch notes show a coordinated cleanup of use-after-free vulnerabilities, with MediaTek's mt76 Wi-Fi drivers and the SMACK LSM taking the heaviest hits. Tree-specific work addresses Realtek SError panics on warm reboots, silent Hyper-V interrupt drops during CPU hot-unplug, and a 32-bit file truncation bug that corrupts extents past 4 GiB. You can expect these fixes to hit major distributions soon, so Wi-Fi 7 operators and Hyper-V hosts should prioritize the updates first.

Linux Kernel Drops Three Stable Releases, Dials in on UAF Fixes and MediaTek Wi-Fi 7 Flaws

Greg Kroah-Hartman signs off on 7.2.4, 6.18.50, and 6.12.109 with roughly 1,650 commits focused on out-of-bounds writes, credential races, and driver memory leaks.

The stable kernel just got a three-for-one discount. Linux 7.2.4, 6.18.50, and 6.12.109 landed today, signed off by Greg Kroah-Hartman. Together they pack roughly 1,650 commits, and if you scan the patch notes, there's a clear theme: use-after-free vulnerabilities are being hunted down across nearly every major subsystem.

The numbers split across three active trees. 7.2.4 brings about 712 commits and sits on the bleeding edge of the current stable line, with 7.3-rc2 already circling. The 6.18 and 6.12 branches are the longterm support tracks, shipping ~547 and ~396 commits respectively. You'll notice a heavy overlap between them. Distros running any of these three get the same core security hardening, which is exactly how a rolling release cadence should work.

WiFi and Driver Patch Flood

MediaTek's mt76 driver family took the heaviest hit this cycle. The Wi-Fi 6/6E/7 stack landed fixes for unvalidated EEPROM addresses that could let device-reported offsets write up to 220 bytes past allocated buffers in the mt7915 and mt7996 chips. Bryam Vargas patched that one, and it's exactly the kind of hardware-supplied offset bug that turns into a privilege escalation waiting to happen. On top of that, Wi-Fi 7 users running WED will finally get relief from a TX DMA mapping leak. Roughly one leak per client association means your SWIOTLB pool dries up in under 48 hours of normal office churn.

Realtek users on arm64 got a targeted fix too. The rtw89 drivers were missing a PCI shutdown callback, which turned warm reboots into SError kernel panics. If you've ever watched a system crash mid-shutdown and seen ASCII fragments of a VERSION string dumped to the panic trace, mwifiex had that same kind of stack corruption bug. Both are now squashed.

Use-After-Free Still Dominates

Half the security patches in this batch chase UAF patterns, and they're scattered everywhere. Jann Horn from Google locked down a credential race in the SMACK LSM that let tasks slip between subjective and objective credentials during signal delivery. Network protocol stacks aren't far behind. net/smc leaked LLC queue entries during link setup, Open vSwitch tripped over flow masks during deletion, and the ancient slip driver finally got its KASAN-reported slab corruption under control. Even the USB core's usbfs and Infiniband's rxe software stack caught UAF bugs that unprivileged users could race into.

It's a rather exhaustive cleanup for what are supposed to be stable trees, though the constant churn of network driver and credential management bugs keeps pushing the kernel team toward deeper static analysis. The dm-pcache fix rounds out the list, closing a kset_replay UAF that could have caused out-of-bounds writes when segment numbers hit zero. Tree-specific work includes a FUSE patch that finally waits for filesystem unmount to finish before tearing things down, plus a Hyper-V PCI fix that stops MSI interrupts from silently dropping during CPU hot-unplug.

Dry run? Not cheap in patch terms. Actually, these are free. The maintenance cost is real. You'll want to apply the UDF 32-bit truncation fix if you're running older kernels with large drives. Wi-Fi 7 operators on mt7996 hardware should probably prioritize the DMA leak fix first. Hyper-V guests running CPU hot-unplug workloads owe themselves that MSI retrigger patch.

Linux kernel 7.2.4 released

Linux kernel version 7.2.4 is now available:

Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v7.x/linux-7.2.4.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v7.x/patch-7.2.4.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v7.x/linux-7.2.4.tar.sign

You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v7.2.4/v7.2.3

Linux kernel 6.12.109 released

Linux kernel version 6.12.109 is now available:

Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.12.109.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.12.109.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.12.109.tar.sign

You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.12.109/v6.12.108

Linux kernel 6.18.50 released

Linux kernel version 6.18.50 is now available:

Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.18.50.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.18.50.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.18.50.tar.sign

You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.18.50/v6.18.49