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