Home Assistant OS 18.4 was published on 27 October 2026 at 13:42 Polish time, and by the evening the stable update channel was offering it to every board, from generic x86-64 to Raspberry Pi 4. The release notes call it a bugfix and security release and end the summary with "All users are encouraged to upgrade."
What it fixes
Most of the changes repair regressions that arrived with 18.3 and its newer kernel. VLAN networking on Realtek adapters had stopped working, and so had RTL8761B Bluetooth dongles with USB ID 0bda:a728. Both broke with kernel 6.18.45. The Bluetooth fix is a backported patch for Green, the virtual appliance, generic x86-64, ODROID, Khadas VIM and generic aarch64 images. The VLAN fix restores hardware tag insertion and is listed for Raspberry Pi, Yellow, generic x86-64 and ODROID.
There are also boot and storage fixes. The U-Boot scripts now refill the boot counters before choosing a slot. Before, a board booting from a USB disk could lose that write when the Raspberry Pi bootloader cut USB power on reboot, and loop forever. On Raspberry Pi, UAS mode is turned off for two USB to SATA bridges: the ASMedia chip in the Argon ONE M.2 case, which was reported to freeze the system under heavier writes, and the ASMedia ASM235CM in the UGREEN 70499 CM300 enclosure, which a Raspberry Pi 4 did not recognise.
Smaller items: firmware for the RTL8761CU Bluetooth controller, EROFS deduplication disabled on all boards, Jasper Lake pin control in the x86-64 kernel and an updated hardware flow control patch for the Raspberry Pi UART.
The security part
The kernel moves to 6.18.58, Docker to v29.8.2, containerd to v2.3.6 and Go to v1.27.3. Buildroot 2025.02.19 brings a new CA certificate bundle which, according to the release notes, "removes trust in the eMudhra root certificates used to sign the compromised intermediate certificates". eMudhra, an Indian certificate authority, published a statement on 21 October about the incident with its intermediate certificates. For a Home Assistant box this means the system no longer trusts TLS connections that chain up to those roots.
Signed images
Downloads now come with a SHA256SUMS file and its signature bundle, SHA256SUMS.sigstore.json. With Cosign you can check that an image was built by Home Assistant and has not been changed. That matters mostly if you flash cards or disks by hand instead of updating from the UI.
Should you update
If you have been waiting on 18.2 because of the Bluetooth or VLAN regressions, this is the release to move to. Everyone else gets the certificate and package updates. The update shows up under Settings > System > Updates like any other OS update.