Linux 7.2 RC2 released!

After the release of Linux 7.1, which brought many features and improvements across different portions of the Linux kernel, such as hardware support and other improvements, an upcoming version of Linux is in the works.

Linux 7.2 RC2 is now live for developers and power users who are willing to try out a pre-release version of Linux that is yet to be released. All the interesting changes from performance improvements to bug fixes have been integrated to this release candidate, including, but not limited to:

• PCIe devices should not inadvertently reduce its speed to 2.5 GT/s
• Improved performance for AMD EPYC Sorano
• Added support for Wacom W9000 pen-enabled touchscreen
• Dropped ancient PROFIBUS driver ported from SCO Unix
• Bug fixes and minor improvements made to NTFS3 driver
• Startup overhead has been reduced for RISC-V
• USB4STREAM has been added to quickly send data between USB4 connected devices
• Preparations for NVIDIA Blackwell-Next devices
• Networking improvements and support for Wi-Fi 8 (UHR)
• Apple M3 systems can now boot to Linux 7.2
• AppleTalk protocol support has been dropped
• Various bug fixes and general improvements

The below announcement from Linus Torvalds in the mailing list says:

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.

Shortlog appended for your pleasure - easy enough to scrool through to get a quick feel for the kinds of things that have been going on. Nothing really stands out..

Linux v7.2 will be the third version from the v7.x series that will be released after Linux 7.1, which will bring many improvements and additions to enhance your user experience.

Arch Linux and other distributions will be updated to utilize Linux 7.2 once it officially releases to the public, with rolling distros being updated first, then the subsequent distributions will utilize this version of Linux according to the distro’s release schedule. Meanwhile, keep checking for updates in your Linux distro (such as pacman -Syu as root in Arch Linux), or compile it from source.

Please note that, if you’re going to try out this pre-release version of Linux, be sure that it might contain more bugs than the final release, as it’s an experimental version not intended for production use. We advise you to back up all critical data before you utilize this version.

To download Linux 7.2’s source code, click on the below button: