Linux 6.18 arrives as the final kernel release of the year, and if history is a guide, it’s poised to become the next long-term support branch. The release reflects a project that’s both maturing and expanding, introducing notable improvements across storage, networking, and hardware enablement, while removing features that never fully found their footing.
With 6.18 now tagged, attention moves to the 6.19 merge window, which will run in parallel with the annual kernel maintainer summit and likely face a modest holiday-driven slowdown. For now, though, 6.18 stands as the kernel that will anchor Linux distributions heading into 2026.
Hardware Enablement Takes Center Stage
Perhaps the most visible shift in 6.18 is in hardware support, particularly for Apple Silicon. Thanks to the Asahi Linux team’s upstream work, the kernel now includes Device Trees for Apple’s M2 Pro, M2 Max, and M2 Ultra chips.
Intel users also see momentum. Early enablement for the upcoming Wildcat Lake platform includes display, power management, and SPI flash support. The kernel also absorbs initial support for haptic touchpads, a small-but-important quality-of-life improvement for many modern laptops.
ARM-based systems beyond Apple gain attention as well. New drivers support Rockchip’s NPU acceleration hardware, and the release brings a preliminary Rust-based DRM driver, Tyr, for Arm Mali GPUs. This marks another milestone for Rust’s growing presence inside the kernel.
Meanwhile, 6.18 can now detect when it’s running inside FreeBSD’s bhyve hypervisor, an understated but meaningful nod to interoperability across open-source ecosystems.
Storage and Memory: Substantial Under-the-Hood Gains
Linux file systems receive a sweeping set of updates. XFS volumes can now be checked and repaired online, an invaluable feature for large storage arrays where offline filesystem checks often mean extended downtime. exFAT operations see dramatic speedups, and Btrfs begins its journey toward supporting block sizes larger than the system page size.
The kernel also introduces the new dm-pcache target, allowing persistent memory technologies to act as a high-throughput cache for slower block devices. For organizations running I/O-intensive workloads, this change offers a workable route to performance gains without re-architecting storage stacks.
On the memory side, 6.18 continues a broader cleanup and modernization effort. The new sheaves mechanism in the Slub allocator boosts performance by enabling per-CPU caching of memory allocations, reducing contention and improving scalability.
Networking: Real Performance Wins
Networking sometimes sees incremental improvements, but 6.18 includes a standout: a major boost to UDP receive performance. Under heavy loads, the kernel now handles UDP packets at a faster rate, an especially welcome change for high-throughput servers and edge systems processing large volumes of real-time data.
TCP also gains initial support for Accurate Explicit Congestion Notification (AccECN), a protocol designed to provide finer-grained congestion signals between endpoints.
Saying Goodbye to Bcachefs
In a reminder that not every experimental feature becomes a permanent fixture, 6.18 formally removes the bcachefs file system from the main tree. While it showed promise when first merged, the project has since shifted to external maintenance and was no longer aligned with kernel development priorities.
