Home Assistant OS 18.0 Released with Linux Kernel 6.18 LTS
Home Assistant OS 18.0 Released with Linux Kernel 6.18 LTS
https://linuxiac.com/home-assistant-os-18-0-released-with-linux-kernel-6-18-lts/
Publish Date: 2026-06-22 17:16:00
Source Domain: linuxiac.com
Home Assistant OS 18.0 has been released as a major update to the Linux-based appliance platform used to run Home Assistant, a free, open-source smart home platform, on devices such as Raspberry Pi boards, Home Assistant Green and Yellow, generic x86-64 systems, and virtual machines.
To be clear, this is not a new release of the application itself. Home Assistant OS is the all-in-one operating system image that provides the Linux base, Supervisor, container runtime, update handling, add-on support, backups, and hardware integration needed to run a managed Home Assistant installation.
The main change in this release is a platform-wide move from Linux kernel 6.12 to Linux kernel 6.18 LTS. The update also ships Docker 29.5.3, containerd 2.2.4, and Buildroot 2025.02.14, refreshing several core components underneath Home Assistant installations.
Home Assistant OS 18.0 also changes how disk images are prepared. The data partition is no longer overprovisioned in the published images, making flashing faster. As before, the data partition expands automatically on first boot to use the available space.
Additionally, virtual machine users get a simpler setup. Open Virtual Appliance and aarch64 VM images are now pre-sized to 32 GB and no longer need manual resizing before first use.
Another important change concerns swap handling. Previously, the default swap file size was 33% of system RAM, which could be too small on low-memory systems and too large on systems with plenty of RAM. Home Assistant OS 18.0 now clamps the default swap size between 1 GB and 4 GB, while still respecting manually configured sizes.
For Raspberry Pi users, Home Assistant OS can now check and update the Raspberry Pi bootloader firmware directly through the command line. The relevant commands are: ha os boards raspberrypi firmware and ha os boards raspberrypi firmware update.
Home Assistant Core 2026.7 is expected to expose the firmware as an update entity as well. However,…
