The second weekly release candidate of Linux 7.0 is now available for testing.
Linux 7.0-rc2 is out with an initial batch of fixes following last Sunday’s Linux 7.0-rc1 that capped off the busy Linux 7.0 merge window. Among the fixes merged this week were numerous AMDXDNA Ryzen AI accelerator driver fixes along with scattered kernel graphics driver fixes at large. Linus Torvalds also authored a change himself for dropping an old Kconfig option to address tiresome log spam messages. Plus a variety of other bug/regression fixes throughout the codebase.
Linus Torvalds wrote in today’s 7.0-rc2 announcement:
“So I’m not super-happy with how big this is, but I’m hoping it’s just the random timing noise we see every once in a while where I just happen to get more pull requests one week, only for the next week to then be quieter.
Because I don’t think we’ve had a bigger rc2 (counting non-merge commits) in quite a while. It might be because of pent-up work with 6.19 having dragged out that extra week. I guess we’ll see how the release progresses.
rc2 is also a bit unusual in how the bulk of the changes aren’t in drivers. Sure, drivers are still a quarter of the diff, but it’s _only_ a quarter. Normally it’s at least half. Filesystems (mostly smb client, but we’ve got xfs and erofs there too) are another 25%.
The rest (half the diff, for people keeping score at home) is a more mixed bunch, with tests (mostly bpf), core kernel, bpf, arch updates and networking code leading the charge.”
See our Linux 7.0 feature overview to learn more about the interesting features coming with this kernel release due out as stable by mid-April.
