While we are on the horizon of seeing PCI Express 6.0 devices, there are already early Linux kernel patches beginning to surface for PCI Express 7.0.
The PCI-SIG officially released the PCIe 7.0 specification i nmid-2025. PCI Express 7.0 doubles the raw data rate to 128 GT/s to allow for 512GB/s bi-directional communication in a PCIe 7.0 x16 configuration. PCIe 7.0 retains backwards compatibility with prior PCIe revisions, offers power efficiency improvements, and other enhancements.
It will still be quite some time before seeing any PCIe 7.0 hardware (likely late 2027 to 2028) but already early preparations are underway toward Linux support for the PCI Express 7.0 revision.
Ionut Nechita of AWS posted a set of patches this week layout the necessary register and speed definitions as well as the PCIe Gen 7 128 GT/s speed detection and reporting. Plus some basic tweaks around the PCI bandwidth control and thermal cooling for PCIe 7.0. Mostly it’s just the boilerplate code at this point in preparing for PCIe 7.0 without any hardware driver happenings yet.
The code was also only just compile-tested with no PCIe 7.0 hardware yet. In any event those interested in these early RFC patches for PCIe 7.0 for the Linux kernel can see this patch series.
