What's Changed

Minor Changes:

• Cilium uninstall now removes annotations from Kubernetes nodes when clean-cilium-state: true (cilium/cilium#39931, @AritraDey-Dev)
• Deprecate v2alpha1 version of CiliumLoadBalancerIPPool CRD in favor of the v2 version (cilium/cilium#39134, @pippolo84)

Bugfixes:

• Fix bug where we would display the Max Seq. Number for IPsec on 32bits. (cilium/cilium#40622, @pchaigno)

CI Changes:

• Add l7 proxy check for to-fqdns connectivity test (cilium/cilium#40549, @vipul-21)
• cli: switch coredns image to registry.k8s.io, and fix renovate (cilium/cilium#40706, @giorio94)
• connectivity: Allow customization of tcpdump kill timeout (cilium/cilium#40774, @gentoo-root)
• connectivity: rework sniffer to execute tcpdump in background (cilium/cilium#40487, @smagnani96)

Misc Changes:

• chore(deps): update docker.io/library/golang:1.24.4 docker digest to 20a022e (main) (cilium/cilium#40379, @cilium-renovate[bot])
• chore(deps): update docker.io/library/golang:1.24.5 docker digest to ef5b4be (main) (cilium/cilium#40738, @cilium-renovate[bot])
• chore(deps): update go to v1.24.5 (main) (cilium/cilium#40496, @cilium-renovate[bot])
• cilium-cli: Print partial output upon bgp peers errors (cilium/cilium#40278, @rastislavs)
• cilium-cli: Update default network-perf image (cilium/cilium#40376, @HadrienPatte)
• cilium-cli: Use slim k8s packages for connectivity tests (cilium/cilium#40708, @HadrienPatte)
• Fix misc typos (cilium/cilium#40769, @HadrienPatte)
• go.mod, vendor: pull in charts for Cilium 1.18.0 and Tetragon 1.5.0 (cilium/cilium#40823, @tklauser)
• Miscellaneous improvements to option.NewNamedMapOptions (cilium/cilium#40529, @giorio94)
• The unableTranslateCIDRgroups variable is removed as it is not used since the v1.17 release (cilium/cilium#40267, @Surya-7890)
• vendor: Update github.com/google/go-github to v73 (cilium/cilium#40326, @HadrienPatte)
• Update stable release to v0.18.5 by @tklauser in #3060
• chore(deps): update docker.io/library/golang:1.24.4 docker digest to 20a022e by @renovate[bot] in #3061
• Update RELEASE.md by @michi-covalent in #3062
• chore(deps): update golang docker tag to v1.24.5 by @renovate[bot] in #3063
• chore(deps): update go to v1.24.5 (patch) by @renovate[bot] in #3065
• chore(deps): update golangci/golangci-lint docker tag to v2.2.2 by @renovate[bot] in #3066
• chore(deps): update dependency cilium/cilium to v1.17.6 by @renovate[bot] in #3068
• chore(deps): update golang:1.24.5-alpine3.21 docker digest to 3ebc008 by @renovate[bot] in #3067
• chore(deps): update golang:1.24.5-alpine3.21 docker digest to 72ff633 by @renovate[bot] in #3069
• chore(deps): update golang:1.24.5-alpine3.21 docker digest to 6edc205 by @renovate[bot] in #3070
• chore(deps): update golangci/golangci-lint docker tag to v2.3.0 - autoclosed by @renovate[bot] in #3071
• chore(deps): update dependency cilium/cilium to v1.18.0 by @renovate[bot] in #3073
• chore(deps): update docker.io/library/golang:1.24.5 docker digest to ef5b4be by @renovate[bot] in #3072
• Prepare for v0.18.6 release by @tklauser in #3074

Full Changelog: v0.18.5...v0.18.6