Linux 6.18.38, 6.12.95, and Five Other LTS Kernels Drop in Weekly Stable Update
The kernel stable team rolled out fresh point releases for every active longterm branch on July 4. The top of the list lands at Linux 6.18.38. Greg Kroah-Hartman and Sasha Levin shipped the updates, and if you are running any of these trees, it is time to patch.
The weekly stable update is nothing flashy, but it keeps the longterm maintenance branch running smoothly while the mainline development cycle pushes forward. Right now, Linux 7.2-rc1 sits in its merge window, and the stable 6.18 line continues its second year of bugfix backporting. The real story here is what is coming next for the older branches.
Legacy Branches Approaching EOL
Linux 5.10 and 5.15 are counting down to their final months. The December 2026 cutoff is roughly five months away. Five months. That is it. Organizations still clinging to those trees should treat that date as a hard deadline. Five-point-one-zero shipped in late 2020. Five-point-one-five followed in late 2021. Both have served as workhorses for embedded systems, IoT gateways, and enterprise servers, but the maintenance window is closing.
You will need to start migration testing before Q4 2026. Most major distributions already moved past 5.x. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is sitting on 6.8 with HWE pushing toward 6.11. Debian 13 targets 6.12 as its default kernel. RHEL 9.x is still on 5.14 and 6.8, though Red Hat has been quiet about the exact target for RHEL 10. Keep in mind that upstream EOL does not automatically mean your distro drops the kernel overnight. You will want to test the 6.1 or 6.6 trees this fall before committing to anything.
What 7.2 and 7.3 Are Actually Building
The merge window for Linux 7.2 opened on June 15, 2026, and the first release candidate dropped on June 28. Expect the stable kernel around August 16. It is bringing cache-aware CFS scheduling, USB4STREAM video streaming, and the AMD ISP4 image signal processor driver straight to users. RISC-V systems get a 256-core CPU limit bump, which matters considerably more than it sounds for multi-socket ARM servers.
The cache-aware scheduling changes alone justify a quick kernel upgrade for anyone running dense VM workloads. I have been tracking the 7.2 patch submissions, and the improvements to the CFS scheduler are meaningfully cleaner than anything we saw last cycle. Meanwhile, 7.3 is already gathering material. Intel Nova Lake Xe3P graphics support is on the roadmap, along with a fix for PCIe Gen5 NVMe direct I/O bottlenecks that has been sitting in patches for weeks. The unmaintained EFS filesystem driver is getting the axe after twenty-plus years. It has been gathering dust since the early 2000s, and honestly, it should have gone in 2015. The kernel tree does not reward nostalgia. Early ARM platform support is scheduled for deprecation in 2027, and modernization of Model-Specific Register interfaces to 64-bit is already in review.
The Patchset in Practice
This week's stable push is not exactly rolling out gold plating, but the underlying fixes matter. The ksmbd tree closes an out-of-bounds read in smb_check_perm_dacl() that authenticated SMB clients could trigger to read heap memory past the security descriptor allocation. TCP-AO gets a use-after-free fix in the asynchronous key deletion path, a corner case that surfaces when keys are added during CLOSE and then deleted after the socket returns to LISTEN. AppArmor now advertises its TCP fast open mediation fix properly so the feature test suite can actually catch regressions.
The networking side sees several quality-of-life hardening changes. The I2C core fixes a race in adapter registration that left struct device pointers uninitialised before the IDR entry existed. The fbdev layer corrects a misaligned 1920x1080-60 mode entry that was silently flipping the output into doublescan mode, along with a lifetime extension that stops a use-after-free when mode_option_buf gets freed while drivers are still reading it. RISC-V kfence finally marks pages as valid before unprotecting them, which stops spurious TLB faults on newly allocated objects.
The NFS server side is where the real pain shows. Jeff Layton's patch rotation fixes a silent data loss path where deferred writeback errors were not rotating the server's write verifier, meaning clients would think their UNSTABLE writes survived commit when they did not. That violates the NFS durability contract straight out of RFC 1813. The async copy reaper also gets a logic inversion fix, the openowner leak on unconfirmed retry races gets closed, and the SETACL decode path finally releases allocated ACLs on failure instead of leaking them for the lifetime of the server. KVM closes a page overflow in the SEV debug encrypt path that could trip KASAN, and Hyper-V sparse bank queries finally bound-check VP IDs before testing the bank set. MIPS shuts down cleanly again by reporting dying CPUs to RCU during smp_send_stop, which stops the reboot hang that started appearing after a PREEMPT_RT backport.
Linux kernel 6.18.38 released
Linux kernel version 6.18.38 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.18.38.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.18.38.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.18.38.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.18.38/v6.18.37
Linux kernel 6.12.95 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.95 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.12.95.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.12.95.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.12.95.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.12.95/v6.12.94
Linux kernel 6.6.144 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.144 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.6.144.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.6.144.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.6.144.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.6.144/v6.6.143
Linux kernel 6.1.177 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.177 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.1.177.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.1.177.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.1.177.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.1.177/v6.1.176
Linux kernel 5.15.211 released
Linux kernel version 5.15.211 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.15.211.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/patch-5.15.211.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.15.211.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v5.15.211/v5.15.210
Linux kernel 5.10.260 released
Linux kernel version 5.10.260 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.10.260.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/patch-5.10.260.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.10.260.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v5.10.260/v5.10.259
