Home Assistant OS, the full operating system that runs your smart home server on dedicated hardware, is getting a major update. And although it doesn’t include any flashy new features or automation settings, Home Assistant OS 18 tackles increasingly common problems for those utilizing Raspberry Pi setups, older mini PCs, and anyone running a growing collection of add-ons, integrations, and automations.
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A better fallback when RAM gets tight
Smarter swap, less wasted space
The headline change coming to Home Assistant OS 18 is its improved memory management when the physical RAM is full. Until now, the OS set swap at 33 percent of the system’s RAM. For those unfamiliar, swap is a portion of storage that the OS temporarily uses as extra working memory. The issue with the old default was that on low-memory devices like Raspberry Pi, the swap file was too small to be genuinely useful, whereas on high-memory machines, it bloated unnecessarily.
With the new update, this mismatch has been resolved with a fixed range. The default swap is now set between 1GB and 4GB. This means that devices running 2GB RAM or less get a slightly bigger buffer, while systems with more than 12GB RAM will be capped at 4GB.
It’s worth noting that swap storage is still slower compared to physical RAM. So, this is not a substitute for adding RAM, but it can stop a system from becoming unresponsive when demand suddenly spikes.
Makes fresh installations less annoying.
Small fixes, fewer headaches
Raspberry Pi users can check and update the bootloader firmware directly from the Home Assistant OS with a simple CLI command. The only drawback is that Raspberry Pi 5 owners need to ensure that the firmware is up at least from February 2025 before installing the new update. If it’s older, the display output could freeze during boot.
Home Assistant OS 18 now moves to Linux 6.18 Kernel from Linux 6.12. It applies across every supported platform and brings better hardware support, security patches, and enhanced stability. Another quality-of-life improvement with the Home Assistant OS 18 is that installation images are now leaner and quicker to flash to storage. The data partition expands to fill available space on the first boot. Virtual machine users also benefit from the new update as VM image formats are pre-sized at 32GB, so there’s no need to expand the virtual hard drive before use.
Tim Brookes
Home Assistant OS 18 is now available, and the team recommends updating to the latest version.
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Source: Home Assistant GitHub via XDA
Інформація підготовлена на основі матеріалів: www.howtogeek.com