We are down to about one month to go until the Linux 7.0 stable release and out today is Linux 7.0-rc4.
Linux 7.0-rc4 brings preparations for upcoming Rust language releases, fixing some hangs and a performance regression in the mm/cid scheduler code that has existed since Linux 6.19, an AMDGPU fix for an idle / power consumption bug after running compute workloads with RDNA4 GPUs like for Llama.cpp / AI, cpupower’s systemd service file now allows setting the EPP, and various other bug/regression fixes.
Linus Torvalds wrote in today’s 7.0-rc4 announcement:
“So last week looked very calm – for a few days.
Then Thursday hit with the networking pull. And then on Friday everybody else decided to send in their work for the week, with a few more trickling in over the weekend. End result: what had for a short few days looked like a nice calm week turned into another “bigger than usual” release candidate.
To be fair, that “almost everything comes in at the end of the week” is 100% normal, and none of this is surprising. I was admittedly hoping that things would start to calm down, but that was not to be.
I no longer really believe that it was the one extra week we had last release cycle: I’m starting to suspect it’s the psychological result of “hey, new major number”, and people are just being a bit more active as a result.
It’s been fairly consistent: while -rc1 was a fairly normal size at 11.5k commits (not counting merges), we have now have rc2..rc4 all being just a bit larger than usual. Not by a _huge_ amount, by any means, but enough to be noticeable.
Anyway, while the numbers are a bit larger than is typical for this stage in the release, it all looks fairly small and benign. For example, once again the selftest updates show up fairly noticeable in the diffstat, and the actual kernel diffs look mostly pretty flat and spread out – so it may be a fair amount of commits, but it’s mostly all small stuff.”
See our Linux 7.0 feature/changes overview for a look at the prominent changes coming to this kernel version due out in mid-April. Linux 7.0 is to be the kernel powering the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora 44, among other H1’2026 Linux distribution releases.
