XanMod drops 6.18.41 LTS kernel, keeps its patch collection heavy
The performance-focused custom kernel gets its latest point release ahead of a long-term support runway that stretches to late 2028.
XanMod Linux Kernel 6.18.41-xanmod1 landed today. It builds on top of upstream Linux 6.18.41 and carries the project's signature mix of compiler tweaks and third-party patchsets straight into the new point release.
The XanMod project has been running since 2015. Alexandre Frade, known online as prsnl10, maintains it. The project's own documentation describes the approach plainly: it takes the upstream mainline kernel source tree and applies a curated set of performance patches, build optimizations, and third-party patchsets on top. It is not a fork. You get GPLv2 licensed code targeting desktops, workstations, and servers pushing heavy workloads.
Compiler tweaks and ABI tiers
Everything compiles with LLVM's ThinLTO. Software pipelining and polyhedral optimizations sit baked into the build chain. The kernel ships in three x86-64 ABI tiers. The v1 build covers legacy hardware back to AMD K8 and Core 2 from 2003. The v2 tier picks up AMD Family 14h through Goldmont and first through third gen Intel. The v3 tier covers AMD Zen and newer, plus Intel Haswell and up. All three stop at x86-64-v3. XanMod explicitly notes that x86-64-v4 with AVX-512 offers no kernel benefit.
Head here to the package details if you need to pick the right tier for your CPU.
The patch collection
The real meat lives in the third-party patchset hosted on GitLab. XanMod pulls in AMD's 3D V-Cache optimizer as a loadable module. Cloudflare's TCP Collapse lands in for high throughput and low latency. Google's BBRv3 congestion control ships as the default. Netfilter gets RFC3489 full-cone NAT for better gaming and VoIP compatibility. There is also hardware-accelerated FLOWOFFLOAD, ntsync for Windows inter-process synchronization, and Steam Deck EC support as loadable modules.
Keep in mind that PCI ACS Override lets you bypass IOMMU group restrictions for device passthrough in VMs. Graysky's extra GCC and Clang CPU options round out the microarchitecture tuning. You also get Clear Linux patches, Android Binder IPC for Waydroid, and sched_ext scheduler definitions ready to drop in. At this point, the patch collection feels less like a kernel build and more like a bag of sysadmin utilities dressed up in Linux source code.
Upstream Linux 6.18
Linux 6.18 shipped in November 2025. The BPF verifier got loop verification with scalar evolution. Atomic writes are maturing in the block layer. io_uring picked up mixed-sized CQE support and vectored buffer node lifetime fixes. Rust-in-kernel progress landed with Android's Binder IPC moving to a Rust implementation upstream. Discussions around 32-bit system futures also kicked off.
What actually changed in 6.18.41
The point release is a stable bump. Two upstream bugfix commits made it into the XanMod build. Thomas Gleixner's posix-cpu-timers fix prevents a use-after-free vulnerability triggered by a race condition during exec() of a non-leader thread. The second patch expands timer_[re]arm() callbacks with a boolean return value to catch timers set to already-past times. No functional change yet. Just infrastructure for future correctness fixes.
NVIDIA drivers and install notes
The APT repository also ships NVIDIA graphics drivers. You get 595.84 and 580.142 in the open-kernel-modules variants. The non-free component houses the proprietary nvidia-driver-5xx stack.
The repo supports bookworm, trixie, forky, sid, noble, and plucky. Debian oldstable works through the LTS branch only. You can add the repo manually or grab .deb files from SourceForge. Install the kernel, headers, reboot, and check /proc/version. DKMS modules need libelf-dev, clang, lld, and llvm.
Head here to the XanMod repository or check the changelog for the full list of commits. Source packages are mirrored on GitLab and SourceForge, so you can verify the builds if you don't trust the binary download.
