The second weekly release candidate of [1]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 [2]numerous AMDXDNA Ryzen AI accelerator driver fixes along with scattered kernel graphics driver fixes at large. Linus Torvalds also authored a change himself for [3]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 [4]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 [5]Linux 7.0 feature overview to learn more about the interesting features coming with this kernel release due out as stable by mid-April.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+7.0

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-rc2-DRM-Fixes

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Torvalds-Unseeded-Random

[4] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wh=dScTmB+zr7zDdBB-SeFHuqgoQx5PSX5Yusp7LiqgrQ@mail.gmail.com/T/#u

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-7-features-changes