Linux Kernel 6.18 Is Out: What’s New and Important

by George Whittaker

The stable release of Linux Kernel 6.18 was officially tagged on November 30, 2025.

It’s expected to become this year’s major long-term support (LTS) kernel, something many users and distributions care about.

Here’s a breakdown of the most significant changes and improvements in this release:

Core Improvements: Performance, Memory, Infrastructure

The kernel’s memory allocation subsystem gets a major upgrade with “sheaves”, a per-CPU caching layer for slab allocations. This reduces locking overhead and speeds up memory allocation and freeing, improving overall system responsiveness.


A new device-mapper target dm-pcache arrives, enabling use of persistent memory (e.g. NVDIMM/CXL) as a cache layer for block devices, useful for systems with fast non-volatile memory, SSDs, or hybrid storage.


Overall memory management and swapping performance have been improved, which should help under memory pressure or heavy workloads.

Networking & Security Enhancements

Networking gets a boost: support for Accurate Explicit Congestion Notification (AccECN) in TCP, which can provide better congestion signals and more efficient network behaviour under load.


A new option for PSP-encrypted TCP connections has been added, a fresh attempt to push more secure transport-layer encryption (like a more efficient alternative to IPsec/TLS for some workloads) under kernel control.


The kernel now supports cryptographically signed BPF programs (eBPF), so BPF bytecode loaded at runtime can be verified for integrity. This is a noteworthy security hardening step.


The overall security infrastructure and auditing path, including multi-LSM (Linux Security Modules) support, has been refined, improving compatibility for setups using SELinux, AppArmor, or similar simultaneously.

Hardware, Drivers & Architecture Coverage

Kernel 6.18 brings enhanced hardware support: updated and new drivers for many platforms across architectures (x86_64, ARM, RISC-V, MIPS, etc.), including improvements for GPUs, CPU power management, storage controllers, and more.


In particular, support for newer SoCs, chipsets, and embedded-board device trees has been extended, beneficial for people using SBCs, ARM-based laptops/boards, or niche hardware.


For gaming rigs, laptops, and desktops alike: improvements to drivers, power-state management, and performance tuning may lead to better overall hardware efficiency.

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