The 7.2 kernel has been released. Linus said: Well, this last week of the release was - once again - bigger than I would have wished for, but hey, with the whole "new normal" thing, if I delayed releases for that reason we'd probably never have a release at all. Significant features in this release include common attributes support in the bpf() system call, cache-aware load balancing for the CPU scheduler, large-folio support in the Btrfs filesystem, further swap subsystem improvements, improvements to the Landlock security module, support for block devices with inline encryption hardware via the dm-inlinecrypt device-mapper target, and much more. See the LWN merge window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 7.2 page for more information.
Linux kernel 7.2 has been released, adding cache-aware scheduling, ext4 filesystem performance boosts and a slew of new and improved hardware drivers for laptops and peripherals. A merge-widow record was also set during the 9-week development cycle, with more than 2,100 individual contributors involved. AI, obviously, has helped. Commit-crunching by LWN found roughly 5% of commits in 7.2 have an โassisted-byโ tag, indicating AI usage. Not that the latest kernel update was all additions. More than 13,000 lines of code for legacy i486 CPU emulation were removed from Linux 7.2, as was a 40-year-old Hercules graphics card driver, AppleTalk networking [โฆ]
Linux kernel 7.2 is now available for download with new features, enhanced hardware support through new and updated drivers, improvements to filesystems and networking, and much more.
Catch up on the latest Linux news: Manjaro 26.1, Omarchy 4.0, GNOME 51 Beta, OpenSSH 10.5, Podman 6.1, KDE Plasma 6.6 gets three years of LTS support, and more.
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 7.2 as stable! After a very busy kernel cycle due to the increased patch and reporting churn due to AI/LLM ages, Linux 7.2 managed to make it out today on-schedule for this feature-packed kernel. Linux 7.2 is going on to power Ubuntu 26.10 and other upcoming Linux distribution releases...
Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel stable release expected to occur in the coming hours, a last minute "x86/urgent" pull request was submitted with one patch for adding the new tlbi= boot option...