Way back in 2017 for the Linux 4.12 kernel the Realtek rtl8723bs WiFi driver was added to the kernel's staging area. Nearly a decade later, it's still being cleaned-up to suit the more rigorous non-staging area of the kernel in the formal networking subsystem. For Linux 7.2, the staging pull request is once again dominated by clean-ups to this Realtek WiFi driver.

The Realtek RTL8723BS staging driver

Merged back in Linux 5.15 in 2021 was KSMBD as an in-kernel SMB3 file server . There hasn't been much KSMBD news to report on recently but for Linux 7.2 there is now SMB2 compression support.

Linux developer Namjae Jeon took some time away from his new NTFS driver and F2FS driver efforts to work on this new compression support for KSMBDD. Microsoft SMB 3.1.1 introduced native in-transit data compression to accelerate file copying using algorithms

The many memory management "MM" related improvements were recently merged to Git for the Linux 7.2 kernel. As typical most kernel cycles, some of the low-level improvements can yield nice efficiency wins and better performance in different areas.

The items I found most interesting with the MM feature changes for the Linux 7.2 kernel included:

- Improving MGLRU 's reclaim loop and dirty writeback handling. The patch series yields up to a 30% increase in some workloads such as MongoDB with YCSB. With

While the new NTFS file-system driver merged for Linux 7.1 and has seen more improvements for Linux 7.2 , for now at least the NTFS3 kernel driver continues to be maintained with new fixes and improvements. NTFS3 is the driver that was upstreamed to the Linux kernel a few years ago back during the pandemic by Paragon Software.

With no immediate plans to remove NTFS3 from the Linux kernel with the new NTFS driver still proving itself, Konstantin Komarov with Paragon Software continues maintaining this NTFS read/

The Flash-Friendly File-System ( F2FS ) have landed for Linux 7.2.

One of the most notable changes for F2FS in Linux 7.2 is FSERROR error reporting support . The FSERROR framework was merged in Linux 7.0 for handling generic I/O error reporting that can be common across Linux file-systems rather than each file-system rolling their own reporting implementation. Now with Linux 7.2, F2FS has joined the FSERROR party for standardizing I/O

In addition to AMD engineers being busy rolling out HDMI 2.1 for their open-source Linux driver at long last, another notable display-related improvement on the way to their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver is exposing the Gamma 2.4 and Gamma 2.6 curves support.

Stemming from the Display Next Hackfest 2026 that took place last month in France, there was interest expressed from unspecified parties in seeing AMD hardware exposing their gamma 2.4 and 2.6 curves under Linux. Patches sent out

The KVM virtualization-related changes were merged a few days ago for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel merge window. While there are a number of features/improvements for AMD and Intel virtualization as well as the likes of s390 and RISC-V, there aren't any new features on ARM64. The lack of ARM64 feature work this cycle is being attributed to "so many AI-fueled fixes" swamping the ARM Linux developers.

As I covered a week ago when it

A one line code change to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for its generic x86 tuning is benefiting modern Intel and AMD processors.

Intel software engineer Lili Cui discovered it's quite worthwhile increasing the misprediction cost of the generic x86 tuning for the GCC compiler. On the basis of modern CPUs having deeper pipelines and thus making branch mispredictions more expensive, increasing the cost in the generic tuning table helps avoid pipeline stalls from mispredicted branches. This is for those just relying on the generic x86