In working toward releasing the stable [1]Linux 7.2 kernel in less than one month's time, out today is Linux 7.2-rc5 to ship this week's latest bug/regression fixes and help facilitate more testing of this in-development kernel version.

Linux 7.2-rc5 brings a variety of bug fixes, many of which continue to turn up via AI/LLM agents. Linux 7.2-rc5 brings [2]the "new normal" of audio fixes across the board, driven on by many AI-powered discoveries and lots of quirky hardware out there. Linux 7.2-rc5 also [3]fixes an issue in the IEEE-1394 Firewire IPv4 networking that has existed in the mainline Linux kernel since 2009.

Linus Torvalds wrote in today's [4]7.2-rc5 announcement :

"It's Sunday afternoon, and once more we have quite a massive -rc5.

The same thing happened in 7.1, so part of it is just the "new normal". But I think this time the bigger part of it is that the networking tree ended up having some pent up work from the previous week due to conference distractions. So over a third of the patch is networking, although the bulk of that is obviously on the driver side.

There are all the usual other drivers in here too, although for a change there are more USB changes than GPU drivers. So that's something. But there's a little bit of everything on the driver side (sound, tty, block, firewire - you get the idea).

And then there's everything else: tooling (selftest and perf), fielsystems (smb, btrfs), rust and arch fixes, documentation...

So it's a bit too big for my liking, but nothing in there strikes me as particularly strange or scary."

There are [5]many new features and changes with Linux 7.2 that will ideally debut as stable in three weeks on 16 August.



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

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-rc5-Audio-Fixes

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-Fix-IPv4-Firewire

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-rc5-Released

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