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, firmware updating is only possible when booting from an SD card, or generally on Raspberry Pi 5 and Home Assistant Yellow with a Compute Module 5.
Importantly, there is a warning for Raspberry Pi 5 users. Home Assistant OS 18.0 requires bootloader firmware from at least February 12, 2025. Without it, display output may freeze early during boot.
Users should update the bootloader before installing the OS update, either with rpi-eeprom-update -a, through Raspberry Pi Imager using a spare SD card, or by running the new Home Assistant OS firmware update command over SSH immediately after updating.
On top of that, for new Raspberry Pi 4 installations, the default graphics driver changed from the older FKMS driver to the modern KMS driver. This enables HDMI-CEC support and applies only to new installations. Existing installations need manual changes in config.txt to switch.
Home Assistant OS 18.0 also improves the first-boot experience. The landing page shown before Home Assistant Core finishes installing now includes a progress bar during the Core download process. Plus, initial mDNS announcements have been fixed, letting the device be discovered by mobile apps while setup is still in progress.
Hardware and platform support has been updated as well. NFS v4.1 and v4.2 are now enabled across all targets, usbip is enabled on all targets, and generic x86-64 and OVA builds receive updated support for hardware such as Intel Xe GPU, MediaTek MT7920/MT7925 Bluetooth and Wi-Fi firmware, JMicron PCIe network adapters, and RTL8125D rev.b firmware.
Home Assistant OS 18.0 is available now, and the project recommends that all users update. For additional details, see the changelog.
