Linux 7.2 RC1 released!

After the release of Linux 7.1, which brought many features and improvements across different portions of the Linux kernel, such as hardware support and other improvements, an upcoming version of Linux is in the works.

Linux 7.2 RC1 is now live for developers and power users who are willing to try out a pre-release version of Linux that is yet to be released. All the interesting changes from performance improvements to bug fixes have been integrated to this release candidate, including, but not limited to:

• PCIe devices should not inadvertently reduce its speed to 2.5 GT/s
• Improved performance for AMD EPYC Sorano
• Added support for Wacom W9000 pen-enabled touchscreen
• Dropped ancient PROFIBUS driver ported from SCO Unix
• Bug fixes and minor improvements made to NTFS3 driver
• Startup overhead has been reduced for RISC-V
• USB4STREAM has been added to quickly send data between USB4 connected devices
• Preparations for NVIDIA Blackwell-Next devices
• Networking improvements and support for Wi-Fi 8 (UHR)
• Apple M3 systems can now boot to Linux 7.2
• AppleTalk protocol support has been dropped
• Various bug fixes and general improvements

The below announcement from Linus Torvalds in the mailing list says:

So two weeks have passed, and the merge window is closed. Things look reasonably normal for this release (knock wood), and I'm appending my merge shortlog below, since we obviously have much to many changes to list individually.

The stats look pretty normal, although another AMD header drop means that a third of the patch is just various AMD GPU register definitions.

That's not unusual in itself, and if you ignore that part the rest looks pretty normal too: just over half the patch is drivers (even when _not_ counting that AMD register dump, other GPU driver changes show up, but we've got a little bit of everything in there), with the rest being the usual spread of architecture updates, tooling, documentation, and core kernel updates.

I'm going to take the next week mostly off, but I'm reading email and keeping up with things. But I hope it's going to be a fairly calm week. If I have longer latencies than usual, you'll know why.

Linux v7.2 will be the third version from the v7.x series that will be released after Linux 7.1, which will bring many improvements and additions to enhance your user experience.

Arch Linux and other distributions will be updated to utilize Linux 7.2 once it officially releases to the public, with rolling distros being updated first, then the subsequent distributions will utilize this version of Linux according to the distro’s release schedule. Meanwhile, keep checking for updates in your Linux distro (such as pacman -Syu as root in Arch Linux), or compile it from source.

Please note that, if you’re going to try out this pre-release version of Linux, be sure that it might contain more bugs than the final release, as it’s an experimental version not intended for production use. We advise you to back up all critical data before you utilize this version.

To download Linux 7.2’s source code, click on the below button:

Source code #Computer #Computers #Kernel #Laptop #Laptops #Linux #Linux7 #Linux72 #LinuxKernel #news #Tech #Technology #update