The Linux 7.0 kernel is gearing up for its stable release and should be out this coming Sunday, 12 April, barring any major last minute issues.
Linux 7.0 is coming with Linus Torvalds preferring to bump the major kernel version after x.19, as opposed to being driven by any particular features/changes or breakage. In any event with Linux 7.0 as with most kernel cycles there is quite a lot of new features and changes to get excited about. Ahead of Sunday’s release, here is a reminder about some of the most notable changes to look forward to with Linux 7.0:
– Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) now defaults to “auto” mode on Intel TSX-capable CPUs without any known TSX security issues, which will be able to help with out-of-the-box performance compared to the prior off-by-default mode.
– Some nice performance optimizations seen on AMD EPYC, thanks in part to scheduler scalability enhancements, memory management performance optimizations, and other Linux 7.0 kernel optimizations..
– Initial hardware enablement for some upcoming AMD Radeon graphics hardware.
– Continued enablement work on Intel Crescent Island and Nova Lake graphics support.
– Autonomous self-healing capabilities for XFS.
– Improved EXT4 write performance for concurrent direct I/O writes.
– Standardized generic I/O error reporting for the Linux kernel.
– A nice UDP network performance boost thanks to inlining a function.
– Continued upstreaming work around Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite SoC and laptop support.
– Rust 1.95 preparations and other Rust code improvements.
– New Kconfig options make it easier to replace the Tux logo with a logo of your choice for displaying during the kernel boot process.
More details on the Linux 7.0 kernel changes via our feature overview. Look forward to Linux 7.0 hopefully releasing on Sunday followed by the start of the Linux 7.1 merge window.
