The first release candidate of Home Assistant OS 18.4 came out on 20 October 2026 and is already offered on the beta channel. The developers call it a small bugfix and security release, mostly cleaning up kernel regressions introduced in 18.3. Two changes stand out: release images now come with a signature you can check, and the VLAN problem on Realtek network cards is fixed.

Images you can verify

Every release now ships with a SHA256SUMS file and its signature bundle, SHA256SUMS.sigstore.json. With Cosign you can confirm that an image was built by Home Assistant's release workflow and was not changed afterwards. According to pull request #5053, the checksum list is signed with cosign sign-blob through GitHub OIDC, and trust rests on Sigstore's public root plus the workflow identity, the same approach the Supervisor already uses. The build waits for signing, so a version cannot be published without its signature. The PR also names the upcoming Home Assistant installer as one of the tools that will check images this way.

This matters most for anyone who downloads an image by hand and writes it to an SD card or SSD. The 18.4.rc1 release already carries both files.

The Realtek VLAN fix

After updating to 18.3, some users saw their machine get an address, show up for a moment and then drop off the network. Issue #5019, reported on a mini PC with an Intel N150, shows repeated transmit queue timeouts from the r8169 driver on 802.1Q VLAN interfaces, and the only way back was booting the old 18.2 slot.

The cause is in the kernel: Realtek adapters time out when a VLAN with reorder_hdr disabled uses checksum or TCP segmentation offload. The Supervisor already worked around it by enabling reorder_hdr, but 18.4 cherry-picks the upstream kernel fix (#5105), so VLAN interfaces set up outside the Supervisor are covered too.

Booting and USB disks

  • A Raspberry Pi booting from a USB disk could end up in an endless reboot loop when both A/B slots had run out of boot attempts. The scripts reset the counters to 3, but that write stayed in the drive's cache and was lost when the bootloader cut USB power on reboot. The scripts now refill the counters before choosing a slot (#5054).
  • UAS mode is turned off for the ASMedia bridge in the Argon ONE M.2 case, which could freeze the Raspberry Pi under heavier writes (#5051), and for the UGREEN 70499 CM300 enclosure, which a Raspberry Pi 4 did not recognise (#5035).

Other changes

The Linux kernel moves to 6.18.57 on Green, ODROID, Khadas, generic x86-64, generic aarch64 and the virtual appliance. Docker goes to 29.8.2, containerd to 2.3.6 and OS Agent to 1.14.0. Firmware for the RTL8761CU Bluetooth controller is added, and generic x86-64 gains Jasper Lake pin control support.

This is a release candidate, so unless you are on the beta channel, wait for the final 18.4.