Linux 7.0 is coming with Linus Torvalds preferring to bump the major kernel version after x.19, as opposed to being driven by any particular features/changes or breakage. In any event with Linux 7.0 as with most kernel cycles there is quite a lot of new features and changes to get excited about. Ahead of Sunday's release, here is a reminder about some of the most notable changes to look forward to with Linux 7.0:
- Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) now defaults to "auto" mode on Intel TSX-capable CPUs without any known TSX security issues, which will be able to help with out-of-the-box performance compared to the prior off-by-default mode.
- Some nice performance optimizations seen on AMD EPYC , thanks in part to scheduler scalability enhancements, memory management performance optimizations, and other Linux 7.0 kernel optimizations..
- Initial hardware enablement for some upcoming AMD Radeon graphics hardware.
- Continued enablement work on Intel Crescent Island and Nova Lake graphics support.
- Autonomous self-healing capabilities for XFS.
- Improved EXT4 write performance for concurrent direct I/O writes.
- Standardized generic I/O error reporting for the Linux kernel.
- A nice UDP network performance boost thanks to inlining a function.
- Continued upstreaming work around Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite SoC and laptop support.
- Rust 1.95 preparations and other Rust code improvements.
- New Kconfig options make it easier to replace the Tux logo with a logo of your choice for displaying during the kernel boot process.
More details on the Linux 7.0 kernel changes via our feature overview . Look forward to Linux 7.0 hopefully releasing on Sunday followed by the start of the Linux 7.1 merge window.