Greg Kroah-Hartman shipped six new Linux kernel versions, spanning the entire supported matrix from the newest 7.2.6 short-term line down to the five-year-old 5.10.270 longterm branch. Each release landed within minutes of the other, carrying only upstream bug fixes and security patches with no new features. Networking and memory-safety defects dominate the fixes, though most are local-privilege-escalation or DoS risks rather than remote code execution. Tarballs, patches, and full diffs are now available on kernel.org across the v7.x, v6.x, and v5.x directories.
Linux Releases Seven Kernels in a Coordinated Stable Push
A single September 14 push spans the newest short-term stable line all the way down to five-year-old longterm branches.
Greg Kroah-Hartman shipped seven new Linux kernels on Monday, September 14, in one coordinated batch, and they cover the entire supported version matrix. That is unusually broad. You have the newest short-term stable line, four active longterm branches, and two extended-support versions, all patched on the same afternoon.
They went out between 13:19 and 13:41 CEST, minutes apart. That tight grouping is the telltale sign of the weekly stable/longterm release Greg and the team run while the mainline tree plays in the -rc sandbox. Right now that sandbox holds 7.3-rc3, landed the day before. So none of these seven bring new features. They are just upstream fixes backported onto earlier parents, which is exactly what you want from a stable release.
Why the breadth matters
What makes this batch worth pausing for is the coverage. Most weekly pushes touch a couple of lines. This one grabbed the whole supported matrix at once. The 7.2.6 stable line carries the newest 2026 feature release. The 6.18.x, 6.12.x, 6.6.x, and 6.1.x longterm branches cover today's servers, cloud, and ARM devices. The 5.15.x and 5.10.x lines are the old guard now, dating back to 2021 and 2020, yet still running a big chunk of embedded, automotive, and IoT hardware.
Vendors keep backporting fixes into those 5.15 and 5.10 lines for years after mainline abandons them, so this lands harder than a Tuesday patch usually does. Commit counts vary by tree anyway. 7.2.6 took the most work at roughly 1,816 commits. The 6.6.157 line came in a close second with about 1,418. The oldest, 5.10.270, carried just under 800 at a tidy 792.
Here is a slight detour that matters more than you'd expect. Those commit totals floating around are just the count of distinct upstream commits inside each ChangeLog, derived by counting commit headers. Kernel.org lists fixes but does not assign CVE numbers itself, so treat those figures as fix frequency, not an official vulnerability tally.
What actually got fixed
Networking is always the big area in these batches, and it is here too. But the dominant theme across all seven trees is memory-safety: use-after-free, out-of-bounds reads and writes, stack and heap overflows, shift-out-of-bounds defects. A lot of it came straight from syzbot, the kernel's automated fuzzer, which keeps turning up the weird and nasty bugs.
One class of fixes stands alone. The net/sched qdisc packet-scheduler got a coordinated hardening across nearly every line, clamping quantum and MTU values. A crafted tc configuration could otherwise trigger a tiny-quantum deficit spin, a soft-lockup DoS that hammers the machine. It is a nice touch that Greg pulled the same fix across so many branches at once.
If you follow the ksmbd SMB server specifically, there is an out-of-bounds read in share-config responses. The patch validates payload sizes before consuming variable-length fields, bounding the veto list and accounting for the separator byte. It was reported through a workflow touching UC Berkeley and Trail of Bits.
Then there is the usual driver grab-bag. Wifi, ARM64/ARM SoC bring-up, SCSI, USB, Bluetooth, media, and sound all show up. The mt7915 wifi driver got a use-after-free fix in its dump work, and a Bluetooth regression that broke LE connections to BR/EDR-only adapters got corrected on the 6.1 line.
Some of these are easy to shrug off. A shift-out-of-bounds in usb/atm that UBSAN caught. An off-by-one read in an audio codec. But add them up across seven trees and you end up with a meaningful chunk of hardening.
The security angle
Here is the honest read. Most of these are not "remotely execute code on your server" fixes. Several live in areas you can only reach from inside a user and net namespace with local CAP_NET_ADMIN, which puts them in local-privilege-escalation or DoS territory rather than RCE. However, at the same time, the networking paths can sit network-facing on real servers, so the line between local and remote gets blurry fast.
The defect classes are the familiar ones. Out-of-bounds reads in ksmbd, stack and heap overflows in perf and slip, signed-overflow soft-lockups across the qdisc family, OOB writes in bpf and apparmor policy unpacking. Length-validation gaps in libceph and the usb/atm driver round it out.
One caveat worth stating plainly. kernel.org ChangeLogs list fixes but do not assign CVE numbers themselves. Individual commits only get a CVE when the stable team or your distro references them. So those commit counts are fix frequency, not an official CVE tally. Do not go chasing a numbered vulnerability list here.
Where everything sits
For anyone trying to decide whether to upgrade, here is where each line lands. The 7.2.x series is the current short-term stable, with 7.3-rc3 still cooking. The 6.12.x, 6.6.x, and 6.1.x lines are active longterm branches from late 2025 through early 2023, still getting fixes. The 5.15.x and 5.10.x lines are the mature extended-support versions, first released in 2021 and 2020.
The 5.10 line in particular earns a second look. It is over five years old by now, yet it still pulled 792 commits this round. That is the whole point of longterm support, but seeing it ride alongside the newest line in a seven-wide batch is a reminder of how much production hardware still depends on it.
Getting the tarballs
Head here for the official downloads:
Linux kernel 7.2.6 released
Linux kernel version 7.2.6 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v7.x/linux-7.2.6.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v7.x/patch-7.2.6.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v7.x/linux-7.2.6.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v7.2.6/v7.2.5
Linux kernel 6.18.52 released
Linux kernel version 6.18.52 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.18.52.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.18.52.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.18.52.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.18.52/v6.18.51
Linux kernel 6.12.110 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.110 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.12.110.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.12.110.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.12.110.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.12.110/v6.12.109
Linux kernel 6.6.157 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.157 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.6.157.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.6.157.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.6.157.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.6.157/v6.6.156
Linux kernel 6.1.188 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.188 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.1.188.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.1.188.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.1.188.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.1.188/v6.1.187
Linux kernel 5.15.221 released
Linux kernel version 5.15.221 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.15.221.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/patch-5.15.221.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.15.221.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v5.15.221/v5.15.220
Linux kernel 5.10.270 released
Linux kernel version 5.10.270 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.10.270.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/patch-5.10.270.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.10.270.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v5.10.270/v5.10.269
