Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has extended the support lifetimes of several long-term kernels, after consultations with major users and fellow maintainers.
Slowly but surely, the Linux kernel is catching up with its users’ wants when it comes to longevity.
Greg Kroah-Hartman, the maintainer of the stable and long‑term support branches of the Linux kernel, has announced that the time until end of life for most LTS kernels is being stretched — a move that will likely also stretch to include future kernel releases. In an item sent Thursday on the kernel.org mailing list, Kroah-Hartman said the decision was “based on lots of discussions with different companies and groups and the other stable kernel maintainer.”
This isn’t the first time that kernel life has been extended. In the past, long-term support branches have also received extra years of maintenance when they proved especially important to distributions and vendors. These adjustments usually reflect real-world adoption rather than any strict, preplanned schedule.
Kernel end-of-life dates mean very little for users, even at the enterprise level. Enterprise Linux distros have already been supporting official expired kernels for decades. Major Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases, for example, come with a 10-year standard lifecycle, with Extended Life Cycle Support available to push coverage further out. SUSE’s SLES 16 is designed with up to a 16‑year lifecycle for the major release and 10 years for the final minor point release. Canonical has already extended Ubuntu LTS to 15 years total for paying customers (5 years standard, 5 years ESM, 5 years Legacy add‑on).
| Branch | Old projected EOL | New projected EOL |
|---|---|---|
| 5.10 | Dec 2026 | Dec 2026 (no change) |
| 5.15 | Dec 2026 | Dec 2026 (no change) |
| 6.6 | Dec 2027 | Dec 2027 (no change) |
| 6.12 | Dec 2026 | Dec 2028 |
| 6.18 | Dec 2027 | Dec 2028 |
These days, even after a distro has reached its end of life and is no longer officially supported, it’s not uncommon for enterprises to continue running that version for many years, using services such as TuxCare, which supports EOL distros and keeps them patched against vulnerabilities for many years. Companies with large fleets of servers can realize considerable savings by squeezing extra time out of officially unsupported software.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux