Linux kernel stable version maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman recently officially confirmed that the recently released Linux 6.18 has been designated as this year's long-term support (Long Term Support, LTS) kernel version and has been marked as an LTS branch on the official release page of kernel.org. It is jointly maintained by Greg Kroah-Hartman and Sasha Levin.
This means that Linux 6.18 will become one of the key kernel versions deployed in production environments by enterprises and distributions in the coming period.
According to the current plan announced on kernel.org, Linux 6.18 LTS is expected to be supported for at least two years, with a maintenance cycle tentatively scheduled until December 2027, during which time it will continue to receive stable updates and security fixes. Whether to extend the support period in the future will be decided based on a comprehensive evaluation of factors such as adoption in enterprise-level scenarios, test feedback, and backport workload. In the next 24 months, Linux 6.18 LTS will serve as a relatively stable technical baseline for mid- to long-term construction and adaptation of servers, embedded devices, and commercial distributions.
By convention, the kernel version selected as LTS every year is usually the official release of the last major version number of the year, so it is not surprising that 6.18 becomes this year's LTS kernel, but it has officially changed from "expected candidate" to "officially confirmed". As a new generation long-term support branch, Linux 6.18 integrates a large number of improvements and new features in performance, hardware support, and security. The relevant features have been previously reviewed in detail in independent reviews of the new features of 6.18. On the other hand, the next version of the stable branch Linux 6.19 is not expected to be officially released until February next year, so in the next period of time, 6.18 LTS will be at the "intersection" of technology updates and production deployment.
