Self-hosters running Home Assistant on single-board computers are getting one of the largest kernel jumps in the project's history. Version 18.0 of Home Assistant Operating System moves every build target from Linux 6.12 to the 6.18 series, a leap that pulls in newer drivers and firmware across the board. Among the additions are the Intel Xe DRM driver for x86-64 systems, MediaTek MT7920 Bluetooth and WiFi firmware and MT7925 Bluetooth firmware, and a RTL8125D revision B network controller blob. Docker has been bumped to v29.5.3 with containerd v2.2.4, and the underlying Buildroot moves to 2025.02.14.
The headline feature for Raspberry Pi owners is in-band bootloader management. The EEPROM firmware can now be checked and updated directly from the OS with ha os boards raspberrypi firmware and ha os boards raspberrypi firmware update, with Home Assistant Core 2026.7.0 set to surface the same control as an update entity. That convenience comes with a sharp caveat: 18.0 was pulled from the stable channel because updates fail on older firmware (#4811). Raspberry Pi 5 boards now require a bootloader dated 2025-02-12 or newer, since an older one can kill display output early in boot. Anyone who already updated should run the firmware update over SSH before the next OS update, and the project recommends taking a backup first.
The release reaches well beyond the Pi. Kernel 6.18.35 lands on the generic x86-64 and aarch64 images, Hardkernel ODROID boards, and the Khadas VIM series, alongside a fix for ODROID-C2 USB hotplug. On the Raspberry Pi 4, new installations switch from the unmaintained legacy FKMS graphics driver to the modern KMS driver, which brings HDMI-CEC support; existing setups need a manual config.txt edit to make the change. NFS v4.1 and v4.2 are now enabled on all targets, usbip is built in everywhere, and the mix of legacy hassos and newer haos naming has been harmonized to haos across systemd units and helper binaries, which may affect host-side scripts that reference the old names.
Flashing is noticeably quicker because disk images no longer overprovision the data partition, so the unused tail of the filesystem no longer has to be written to storage; the partition still auto-expands to fill the card on first boot. Virtual machine images in the OVA and aarch64 formats now ship pre-sized to 32 GB. The default swap file, previously fixed at 33 percent of RAM, is now clamped between 1 and 4 GB, growing slightly on systems with 2 GB or less and capping at 4 GB above 12 GB of RAM. Home Assistant OS is free and open source; with 18.0 currently held back from the stable channel, Raspberry Pi 5 users in particular should update their bootloader firmware before pulling the OS image.
