This article documents the broad, wide version history of the Linux kernel, a free, open-source, and Unix-like kernel that is used on many computer systems and web servers worldwide.
Since the Linux kernel's creation by Linus Torvalds in 1991, it had rapidly gained popularity as many developers started contributing to the project.
The kernel became self-hosting as of version 0.11 in December 1991. The version 1.0.0 of the kernel was released on March 1994, which consisted of around 176,250 lines in the original unmodified source code.
The most recent stable release of the Linux kernel is , which was released on .
Explanation
In contrast to semantic versioning, the major version carries no intrinsic meaning for the kernel, as Linux promises stable interfaces and behavior even when the major version changes. However, since version 3.x, minor versions have been capped around 20 to avoid the false perception that changes between large minor versions (e.g. from 5.30 to 5.31) would be less voluminous or impactful than changes between smaller minor versions (e.g. from 6.1 to 6.2).
Each feature release identified by the first two numbers of a release version is designated one of the following levels of support:
Stable/Mainline; supported until next stable version and/or 3 months after that. Long-term support (LTS); releases are maintained for a few years. Super-long-term support (SLTS); releases maintained further for many more years by the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP).
Overview
Releases 7.x.y On 8 February 2026, Linus Torvalds announced that the next kernel release will be published as version 7.0. Following the usual release cycle of about two months for every new version, kernel 7.0 was released on 12 April 2026.
Version Original release date Last release Maintainer Prominent features Notes Future release7.3-rc6Linus Torvalds 95% faster throughput on certain tasks for Btrfs users} Improved performance for Ext4 by allowing parallel I/O write operations} Improved cluster-aware task scheduling for Intel's Alder Lake, Lunar Lake and Panther Lake} Fix for Kernel Samepage Merging freezing heavily under high memory usage, dropping lag from 700ms to under 2ms} zsmalloc slowdown fixed which zram and zswap use to store compressed memory. Gives big benefit on slow hardware with low parallel cores.} Fixed kernel freezing cores on flushing memory caches} New library APIs for the AES encryption modes for ECB, CBC, CBC-CTS, CTR, XCTR, XTS, GCM, and CCM} NFS improvements by optimizing I/O submission when not reclaiming memory, along with various bug fixes.} FUSE gains massive read and write performance boost by optimizing I/O} buffer pools} Allocating systematic cache for F2FS metadata} Fixing support for RV1106 SAR-ADC} drivers/staging gets code cleanups and minor fixes} Loads of IIO driver updates + additions for binder driver updates and removal of the SGI XP and GRU drivers} Rework of cached attributes} Fixes for PowerPC, mainly involving in fixing memory overflow} Minor I2C fixes for DMA resource management. Multiple fixes/patchsets for the DRM module improving performance for the free to use, open-source nouveau driverThis release may be an LTS release (usually the last release per calendar year gets designated as LTS, though 7.4 may still fall into 2026)7.2.9Greg Kroah-HartmanTo be determined Cache Aware Scheduling was merged Partial support for Apple M3 Added support for USB4STREAM Deprecation of AF_ALG and removal of insecure crypto driver code Intel KPT support for QAT devices Added HDMI 2.1 FRL support to the AMDGPU driver Enabled Btrfs large folios by default Removal of the Strcpy API7.1.13Greg Kroah-Hartman2 September 2026 Added new NTFS driver (formally NTFSPLUS) Removal of legacy code, including the i486, some PCI and PCMCIA drivers, bus mouse, etc. Apple SMC power driver for battery information on Apple Silicon Enabled Intel FRED by default Real Time support enabled on 32-bit ARM New Coreboot framebuffer driver Intel QAT Zstd support Power reporting for AMD Ryzen AI NPUsThis release removes all legacy i486 support, reducing the number of platforms the latest kernels can be used on.7.0.14 Greg Kroah-Hartman (formerly Linus Torvalds till the release cycle ended) 27 June 2026 Introduced fsnotify to create a standard API for file IO error reporting Live health monitoring on XFS filesystems Added support for Clang capability analysis Better io_uring support for filters open_tree(2) function extended Phase II swap performance with swap table Time slice extension added to rseq Preemption selection simplified AccECN enabled by default BTRFS experimental support for the remap tree kmalloc_obj() introducedFollowing previous conventions, Linux 7.0 is not a major upgrade over the Linux 6.x series, but instead what would have been considered Linux 6.20.
Releases 6.x.y
Version Original release date Last release Maintainer Prominent features Notes 8 February 20266.19.14Greg Kroah-Hartman22 April 2026 listns(2) system call added for namespaces Live update orchestrator Support for PCIe Link Encryption Improvements to the BTRFS filesystem EXT4 filesystem now supports block sizes that are larger than the page size Graphical updates including a color pipeline API and a sharpness property Updates to io_uring Added support for SFrame stack unwinding 30 November 2025Active kernel releases on kernel.org 6.18.55 December 2028 Improved kernel memory allocation performance with slub sheaves A device mapper target for persistent cache Process Namespaces as file handles Support for Accurate Explicit Congestion Notification in TCP Add support for PSP encryption of TCP connections Better swapping performance UDP receive performance improvements BPF signed programs More scalable NFS servers by removing caching Introduction of memdesc_flags_t, for a future leaner struct page Remove bcachefs core code26th LTS release 28 September 2025 6.17.1318 December 2025 Easier CPU bug mitigation selection New file_getattr/file_setattr system calls Better and more secure core dumping Initial priority inheritance support for solving priority inversion Unconditionally compile task scheduler with SMP support Per NUMA node proactive reclaim, for better control of memory reclaim on NUMA systems Introduce a new fallocate(2) flag, for more efficient writing of zeroes Runtime Verification: Support for Linear temporal logic monitors Change bcachefs status from 'Supported' to 'Externally maintained' 27 July 2025 6.16.1212 October 2025 XFS support for large atomic writes USB audio offload support Initial support for Intel Trusted Domain Extensions Allow to zero-copy send TCP payloads from DMABUF memory Automatic weighted interleaved memory allocation policy Support for Intel Advanced Performance Extensions Add support for sending coredumps over an AF_UNIX socket Futex improvements Some Ext4 performance improvements Build optimization for the local CPU on x86 25 May 2025 6.15.1120 August 2025 Btrfs: fast Zstd compression support 24 March 2025 6.14.11 10 June 2025 Improved Wine speed Copilot keyboard key support 20 January 2025 6.13.12 20 April 2025 New handheld support Intel Arc B series support 17 November 2024 6.12.112 December 2028 Real-time support for x86/x86_64, RISC-V, and ARM64 Userspace scheduler extensions support QR codes for DRM panic messages 25th LTS release 5th SLTS with 10 years of support through 2035. Used in Debian 13 "Trixie" and RHEL 10.0 15 September 2024 6.11.11 5 December 2024 Atomic writes support for buffered I/O Dedicated bucket slab allocator to help protect against heap spraying vDSO implementation of getrandom() 14 July 2024 6.10.14Greg Kroah-Hartman & Sasha Levin 10 October 2024 Memory-allocation profiling Encrypted interactions with trusted platform modules Named "Baby Opossum Posse". The one last minute change was made in the credits of the ReiserFS README as requested by the original developer. 12 May 2024 6.9.10 27 July 2024 Improved performance for Intel Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) Support for AMD P-State Preferred Cores Intel FRED (Flexible Return Event Delivery) Support for larger console frame-buffer fonts for 4K displays Faster boot times for systems with lots of RAM and using HugeTLBs DM VDO (Device Mapper Virtual Data Optimizer) mainlined Hibernate LZ4 compression support 10 March 2024 6.8.12 30 May 2024 Deadline servers for better realtime scheduling Multi-size transparent huge pages for anonymous memory Two new syscalls for better mount management: listmount() and statmount() Data type profiling with perf Forbid users from writing to partitions used by filesystems New system calls to deal with multiple stacked LSMs Driver for new Intel Xe graphics Used in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 7 January 2024 6.7.12 3 April 2024 Initial Bcachefs filesystem support Itanium support removed Intel Meteor Lake Graphics declared stable Initial Nouveau support for Nvidia GSP firmware Ability to disable IA-32 support at boot time on AMD64 Expansion of AMD Seamless Boot Support Improvement in loading of x86 microcode Support for RAID stripe tree, simple quota accounting, and temporary FSID added to Btrfs JFS minor stability improvements According to Linus Torvalds, "one of the largest kernel releases we've ever had" 29 October 2023 6.6.158 December 2027 The new EEVDF process scheduler was merged. It aims to replace the CFS scheduler. Intel Shadow Stack was finally merged; Exploiting ROPs is now harder Support for Partial SMT Performance Improvement for CPUs with a lot of cores and shared Last Level Caches Continued Intel Meteor Lake graphics and sound enablement/improvements Better performance for Ext4 and io_uring Security: add io_uring_disabled to shrink kernel's attack surface DEFLATE compression support for EROFS24th LTS release The CFS scheduler was the de facto standard for 16+ years
ReiserFS is now declared to be obsolete and flagged for removal in 2025. 27 August 2023 6.5.13 28 November 2023 Initial USB4 v2.0 support MIDI 2.0 support 25 June 2023 6.4.16 13 September 2023 Intel Linear Address Masking Partial support for Apple M2 Autonomous frequency and power control on AMD Zen architecture CPUs Support for RISC-V hibernation on future laptops Improvements for LoongArch CPU architecture Further Intel Meteor Lake Graphics development 4K resolution support for Rockchip Direct Rendering Manager driver Better AMDgpu support for the Steam Deck Optimizations to EROFS, Btrfs, F2FS, NTFS, and Ext4 Support for Intel Lunar Lake HD Audio Continued Wi-Fi 7 development Quality of life improvements for Apple silicon users Further Rust up-streaming to support the first Rust drivers Removal of SLOB memory allocator 23 April 2023 6.3.13 11 July 2023 Even more Rust in the kernel Initial Support for Intel Meteor Lake Display Intel Meteor Lake VPUs ("Versatile Processing Unit") support AMD Automatic IBRS Intel TPMI driver was merged, hopes are this will give more control over power management. Big Performance Improvement for EXT4. Nice Improvements for BTRFS too IPv4 BIG TCP support, maybe better network performance Microsoft Hyper-V nested hypervisor support. Faster kernel builds and with lower peak memory use. Removed support for the Intel ICC compiler. 19 February 2023 6.2.16 17 May 2023 Intel Arc drivers are now deemed "stable" and on by default. Initial FOSS support for NVIDIA GeForce 30 Series. But performance is poor for now. Support for Apple's M1 Call Depth Tracking as a better performance alternative to IBRS for older Intel CPUs Some Power-savings improvements when the system is idle or lightly loaded. Support for running Raspberry Pi in 4K@60 Hz Better performance and scalability for running RAID5/6 in btrfs-like systems More Rust in the kernel 6.1.189 December 2027 August 2033 Support for writing kernel modules in Rust