In addition to all of the exciting Intel and AMD x86_64 enhancements that have been landing this week so far for the Linux 7.0 kernel, the aging SPARC, Alpha, and Motorola 680x0 "m68k" CPU ports have also seen some patches for this new kernel.

New Linux kernel patches for Sun/Oracle SPARC and DEC Alpha are increasingly rare but for the most part still being maintained by the upstream Linux kernel. Merged this week already for Linux 7

Canonical released Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS today as the newest point release to the Noble Numbat.

Ubuntu 24.04.4 rolls up all the security updates over the past few months into the new ISO releases. Plus with Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS comes the updated hardware enablement "HWE" stack in now pulling in key packages from Ubuntu 25.10. This most notably brings the Linux 6.17 kernel for those wanting the better hardware support or

The Linux 7.0 networking pull request showcases two extremes and the diversity and robustness of the open-source kernel ecosystem. Linux 7.0 is laying the groundwork for WiFi 8 Ultra-High Reliability (UHR) support while this kernel version is also bidding farewell to the last Ethernet driver for use over parallel printer ports.

The big networking subsystem pull request was sent out and merged yesterday for Linux 7.0. The networking highlights in Linux 7.0 include:

- The Linux core networking code has seen a

The Linux kernel's workqueue for async task handling within a dedicated kernel thread is seeing some useful improvements with Linux 7.0 .

Most notable for Linux 7.0 is work on the workqueue rescuer that is used to prevent deadlocks in the workqueue when the system is under memory pressure. Lai Jiangshan of the Ant Group worked on a workqueue rescuer improvement to avoid a situation where a single long-blocking work item could stall all work items behind it and thus causing high latency for the rest of the queue. The

The performance "perf" events changes for the Linux 7.0 kernel are continuing to prepare for next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors as the successor to current Xeon 6 Granite Rapids .

There already has been a lot of kernel upstreaming in preparing for Diamond Rapids along with the other open-source enablement such as to the GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers. With Linux 7.0 the performance events integration is landing.

The performance events code adds the core performance monitoring unit (PMU) for Diamond Rapids to support its

Intel has upstreamed some Resource Control "resctrl" improvements to Linux 7.0 for enhanced telemetry monitoring. This is the good kind of telemetry with this new code being useful for being able to monitor how much energy or work is attributed to a group of tasks / process IDs on the system.

The x86/cache pull request for the Linux 7.0 merge window comes down to the Intel resctrl additions for being able to more easily monitor energy use for a defined group of tasks:

"Extend the resctrl

The Linux 7.0 kernel has removed support for signing kernel modules using SHA-1 as it's no longer considered secure but existing SHA-1 signed modules can still be loaded.

Merged for the Linux 7.0 are the module changes that include removing support for SHA1 since it's no longer considered secure due to the possibility of hash collisions. This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise as months ago we reported on Linux looking to drop SHA1 signing support for kernel modules/

All of the media subsystem driver updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel and brings some new work around AV1 acceleration as well as other driver updates.

The merged code for the media feature updates in Linux 7.0 include introducing the TI VIP driver, adding support to the MGB4 driver for GMSL1 and GMSL‑coax modules, new camera sensor drivers, the Synopsys CSI‑2 receiver driver, VeriSilicon and Rockchip RKVDEC video driver improvements, Intel IPU6 / IPU7 image