News: 0001644882

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Linux 7.2-rc2 Released: "Things Look Very Normal"

([Linux Kernel] 3 Hours Ago Linux 7.2)


Linux 7.2-rc2 is now available for testing in working toward the stable [1]Linux 7.2 release in August.

Linux 7.2-rc2 this week saw [2]increasing the default RISC-V 64-bit core limit from 64 to 256 cores to better reflect the increasing core counts of RISC-V designs. Linux 7.2-rc2 also brings [3]hardening of BPF against JIT spraying attacks . Plus a wide variety of more, mostly mundane bug/regression fixes.

Linus Torvalds wrote in the [4]7.2-rc2 announcement :

"It's Sunday afternoon, and rc2 is out. Things look very normal - it's not a small rc2, but it's in line with recent releases, and slightly smaller than rc2 was in 7.1. Let's see how that all continues, but so far so good.

The diffstat looks normal too, with about half the patch being drivers - the usual suspects accounting for the bulk of it. The rest being spread all over (but mostly filesystems and networking).

The only slightly unusual thing is the header file split where mod_devicetable.h was split into multiple smaller per-subsystem device-id headers, which is how it should always have been done, but wasn't. It's a cleanup, but it also means that we have one fewer of those monster headers that causes almost everything to be recompiled if you touch it - even when the changes are relevant only to a few small files.

Anyway, that shows up in the diffstat, but is hopefully not really visible any other way as all the users hopefully got updates properly. Knock wood."

See our [5]Linux 7.2 feature overview to learn more about all the interesting changes coming for this next kernel version. Linux 7.2 is also set to be the default kernel of the likes of Ubuntu 26.10 and others this autumn.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+7.2

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-RISC-V-256-Cores

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-rc3-BPF-Hardening

[4] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=whWG-cmpRQFPw=U_KPF-NNii=O-MR2GLw4oEpuHuL=HcA@mail.gmail.com/T/#u

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-72-features



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