While the version bump to 7.0 is driven solely by Linus Torvalds’ versioning preferences, with Linux 7.0 there are many great changes to be found in this upcoming stable kernel version to power the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Here is a recap of all the interesting changes with Linux 7.0.
Linux 7.0 is looking quite good from preparing for upcoming AMD and Intel hardware platforms to enabling various new device driver support and more. Plus a variety of performance optimizations showing some very nice performance wins for at least some workloads and hardware. Linux 7.0 also declares the Rust for Linux effort as “here to stay”, dropping of some obsolete drivers, various file-system enhancements, and a lot more to benefit Linux from small embedded and mobile devices up to large HPC/AI servers.
Linux 7.0 feature highlights and changes are looked at below and on the following page. More Linux 7.0 kernel performance benchmarking is kicking off at Phoronix.
Linux 7.0 CPU Changes:
– Linux 7.0 now defaults to Intel TSX auto mode for exposing Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) by default on Intel CPUs without known TSX security issues.
– Intel preparations for DSA 3.0 accelerator IP of the Data Streaming Accelerators.
– New L2 cache statistics reporting for the Turbostat tool that lives within the Linux kernel source tree.
– AMD Zen 6 performance events and metrics support in the perf area of the kernel.
– Intel NTB driver support for Xeon Diamond Rapids.
– Performance events support for Diamond Rapids.
– “Slow” workload hints for Intel Panther Lake.
– New LoongArch CPU features are wired up.
– Nova Lake S support for the Intel LPSS driver.
– Intel Nova Lake sound support.
– CXL support for the AMD Zen 5 Address Translation feature.
– User-space CFI support for RISC-V.
– Improved FPGA dev board support for OpenRISC.
– Support for ARM64’s single-copy atomic LS64/LS64V instructions.
– Some SPARC and Alpha CPU port activity albeit mostly fixes.
– Mainline support for the SpacemiT K3 RVA23 SoC.
Linux 7.0 GPUs / Graphics:
– New AMD graphics hardware support for upcoming products.
– Continued work around SR-IOV and multi-device SVM for the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver.
– Intel multi-queue support for Crescent Island along with other enablement work for that upcoming Intel Crescent Island AI inference accelerator.
– Intel Nova Lake display support.
– The Intel driver is now exposing more graphics card temperature sensors.
– The Intel driver no longer blocking D3cold for all Battlemage GPUs.
– Nouveau is back to exposing larger pages support that will help with NVK performance.
– Imagination’s PowerVR driver now supports the AM62P.
– AMDGPU fixes for older GCN 1.0/1.1 era hardware.
– Various other kernel graphics and display driver improvements.
