Kernel release status

[Posted December 3, 2025 by corbet]

The 6.18 kernel was released on November 30; in the announcement Linus said:

So I'll have to admit that I'd have been happier with slightly less bugfixing noise in this last week of the release, but while there's a few more fixes than I would hope for, there was nothing that made me feel like this needs more time to cook. So 6.18 is tagged and pushed out.

Headline changes in this release include the ability to manage namespaces with file handles, support for the AccECN congestion-control protocol, initial support for signing of BPF programs, improved memory management with sheaves, the Rust binder driver, better control over transparent huge pages, and a lot more. This release also saw the removal of the bcachefs filesystem.

See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 6.18 page for more information.

Stable updates: 6.17.9, 6.12.59, and 6.6.117 were released on November 24, followed by 6.17.10, 6.12.60, and 6.6.118 on December 1.

On December 3, 5.4.302 was released as the final update in the 5.4.x series:

This is the LAST 5.4.y release. It is now end-of-life and should not be used by anyone, anymore. As of this point in time, there are 1539 documented unfixed CVEs for this kernel branch, and that number will only increase over time as more CVEs get assigned for kernel bugs.

For the curious, Kroah-Hartman has also provided a list of the unfixed CVEs for 5.4.302.

The 6.17.11, 6.12.61, 6.6.119, 6.1.159, 5.15.197, and 5.10.247 updates are in the review process; they are due on December 5.