Linux Kernel News Archives

The slab memory allocation changes for Linux 7.2 have been merged and continue to see more work around shaves and performance optimizations.

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display and accelerator driver changes have been merged for Linux 7.2. The Linux 7.2 DRM merge is headlined by the long-awaited HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link (FRL) support for the AMDGPU open-source driver as part of the larger effort of finally proceeding with a full HDMI 2.1 implementation for this AMD Radeon Linux driver.

Yet another performance optimization merged for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel is improving the speed of anon_pipe_write, the kernel function used for writing data into anonymous/unnamed pipes such as when using shell pipelines or standard streams from applications.

The x86/cpu changes have been merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel with an interesting span of changes covering 36 years from the Intel 486 days up to adding the new "rugged" Panther Lake variant.

The scheduler updates were merged this morning for the Linux 7.2 kernel and it's exciting. Cache Aware Scheduling has finally been merged! This is a win for especially modern Intel and AMD processors with multiple last level caches (LLCs).

Miguel Ojeda already mailed in the many Rust code changes for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel. This is quite a big Rust code with more than forty thousand new lines of Rust code in the kernel.

Among the early pull requests sent in prior to today's Linux 7.1 release of new material aiming for Linux 7.2 were all the Kbuild updates.

Linus Torvalds just released the stable Linux 7.1 kernel and it's coming a half-day early thanks to his travel plans.

Linux 7.1 stable is expected to be released this Sunday with its many new features. Immediately following the Linux v7.1 tagging, the Linux 7.2 merge window will open and a lot of new feature material is expected to be merged over the next two weeks.

On Sunday it's anticipated that Linus Torvalds will released the stable Linux 7.1 kernel. This is a really terrific mid-year update to the Linux kernel! Here's what makes me excited about Linux 7.1.

Last week Linux 7.1-rc6 was larger than Linus Torvalds wished for and for Linux 7.1-rc7 it has come in still heavier than typically seen this late in the cycle, but is shrinking and making Linus comfortable in hopefully releasing Linux 7.1 stable next Sunday.

A month ago I wrote about Linux scheduler work to help boost gaming performance on old "potato" hardware with Intel engineer Peter Zijlstra noting that Linux cgroup scheduling has continued to be "a pain in the arse." This work continues advancing with a third iteration of these "flatten the pick" patches being posted.

It's unfortunately another busy week in the Linux 7.1 kernel space with not everything slowing down so well, late in the cycle and leading to the upcoming 7.1 stable release. This week's DRM pull request of kernel graphics/accelerator drivers is again heavy on fixes and also ends up disabling an ioctl interface given ongoing security concerns from that code merged last year.

Danilo Krummrich sent out the main set of DRM Rust subsystem changes on Thursday that are targeting the Linux 7.2 kernel. NVIDIA's open-source Nova driver continues seeing a bulk of the DRM Rust work as this modern successor to Nouveau continues taking shape.

Now that the Linux kernel has been removing Intel 486 CPU support and also proceeding to drop other vintage CPUs like the AMD K5 CPU support and AMD Elan, the Linux kernel is ready to make the TSC support unconditional for x86 processors.

The Linux 7.1-rc6 kernel is now available for closing out the month of May and approaching the Linux 7.1 stable release that should be out by mid-June.

The clearcpuid= kernel parameter can be used to disable specific CPUID features for the kernel by specifying the targeted bit numbers of the feature(s) to disable or their flags from the /proc/cpuinfo output. The clearcpuid parameter, for example, has been useful for carrying out AVX-512 comparison benchmarks for apps that check for the presence of the AVX-512 extensions via /proc/cpuinfo. But moving forward the documentation on clearcpuid is being removed to discourage its use.

Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc6 kernel due out on Sunday, this week's round of USB fixes have been merged with various new device quirks added as well as some patches as a result of scanning tools.

The Linux x32 ABI for x86_64 processors allow making use of the full 64-bit register file and wide data path but retaining 32-bit pointers to provide for a smaller memory footprint when not needing 64-bit pointers. Linux x32 came to the party late and didn't enjoy much adoption over the years and is now looking at possible removal from the Linux kernel.

In the road to releasing Linux 7.1 in June, out today is Linux 7.1-rc5 that continues coming on heavy with fixes.

Merged today for Linux 7.1 was this week's power management fixes with a few notable fixes for both AMD and Intel platforms.

As a very exciting development ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel merge window opening in about one month's time, it looks like the long-awaited Cache Aware Scheduling support will finally be merged! CONFIG_SCHED_CACHE has made it into a TIP branch with all the Cache Aware Scheduling code for helping with Linux performance on modern CPUs sporting multiple last level caches.

Greg Kroah-Hartman took time away from his duties as Linux's second-in-command as stable maintainer, various subsystem maintainer, and recent hobby of using AI/LLMs for uncovering Linux kernel bugs to present at the Rust Week conference.

One of the newest interfaces being worked on for the Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel is an Untrusted Data API for data received into the kernel from user-space.

The latest Linux gaming handheld driver work by Derek Clark of Valve's Linux efforts is the OneXPlayer Configuration Driver that is now set to premiere in the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel cycle.

With yesterday's Linux 7.1-rc4 release are some additional comments by Linux creator Linus Torvalds around AI tooling and the surge in security bug reporting to the Linux kernel due to said LLM-powered tooling.

It was another busy week in the Linux 7.1 kernel space that has culminated with the release of Linux 7.1-rc4.

Merged today for the Linux 7.1 kernel is some new documentation surrounding what qualifies as a security bug as well as around responsible use of AI for finding kernel bugs.

Following yesterday's disclosure of the ssh-keysign-pwn vulnerability that allows unprivileged users to read root-owned files, a slew of new stable kernel releases are out today to address this latest Linux security issue.

Following Dirty Frag, Fragnesia, and other Linux kernel vulnerabilities making themselves known in recent days, the latest now is ssh-keysign-pwn.

Following last week's disclosure of the Dirty Frag vulnerability for the Linux kernel, which only finished being patched up in mainline on Monday, Fragnesia is now public as a similar local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability.

Prominent Linux kernel engineer Peter Zijlstra of Intel has been working on a set of scheduler patches to help with enhancing the behavior and delivering better results, especially for aging hardware he described as a "potato" -- an Intel Sandy Bridge desktop CPU with AMD Radeon RX 580 Polaris graphics. Benchmark results are promising from this work for gaming on old hardware while other workloads may ultimately stand to benefit too.

Linux 7.0.6 is out as stable this morning to finish mitigating the Dirty Frag vulnerability that was made public last week.

Linus Torvalds just issued the third weekly test candidate of the Linux 7.1 kernel with around a third of the patches being for the networking subsystem.

New tooling being worked on for possible mainline Linux kernel inclusion is Kconfirm as a new tool for detecting misusage and efforts stemming from Kconfig, the configuration system for kernel builds.

Linux 7.1-rc2 is out for testing with its accumulation of initial bug and regression fixes that have been collected over the past week since the Linux 7.1 merge window was capped off.

Merged on Friday ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc2 kernel release due out tomorrow were this week's batch of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics / display / accelerator driver fixes.

Even while the Linux 7.1 merge window was still ongoing this month, the initial "drm-misc-next" pull request to DRM-Next was sent out for beginning to queue new feature material toward the Linux 7.2 kernel coming this summer.

My initial testing of the Linux 7.1 development kernel on various systems in the lab continues going well. Aside from one main regression in a synthetic micro-benchmark appearing on multiple systems, not seeing much in the way of Linux 7.1 performance concerns thus far and seeing some nice performance gains in select workloads.

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week was the newest revision of a patch series originally started in early 2025 by a NVIDIA engineer for accelerating page migration. Now being worked on by AMD engineers, this accelerated page migration via batch copies and hardware offloading continues to show promising results.

Just days after the Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel release, the Linux kernel's extensible scheduler class "sched_ext" is seeing a lot of bug fixes. Many of these bug fixes aren't just from the Linux 7.1 merge window but a number date back many kernel cycles. This uptick in bug fixes for sched_ext is coming due to increased AI code review.

The Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel was just released for concluding the Linux 7.1 merge window. A lot of new features are in tow for this next kernel version that will then be out as stable in mid-June.

Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel release due out later today for closing the Linux 7.1 merge window, I was curious if all the code removals would lead to a negative change in line count over Linux 7.0. The removals were not enough and Linux 7.1 Git is fast approaching 40 million lines.

In addition to some network drivers on the chopping block due to AI bug reports for obsolete hardware/drivers and Linux 7.1 dropping various drivers for Russia's Baikal CPUs, the Linux 7.1 kernel as of today also dropped some obsolete PCMCIA host controller drivers.

Over the weekend Greg Kroah-Hartman sent out his various pull requests for the areas of the kernel he oversees. Among those is the staging area where this time around the notable activity isn't too much about feature work but many developers making some of their first contributions to the upstream kernel.

Andrew Morton recently sent out his various "MM" related pull requests for the ongoing Linux 7.1 kernel. There are a number of memory management optimizations in this next kernel version, which is always nice to see but all the more so these days with the inflated RAM pricing and other computer component prices.

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver and accelerator driver changes for Linux 7.1 were recently merged to Git. As usual, it's the Intel and AMD kernel graphics drivers seeing a bulk of the interesting open-source GPU driver activity. Plus ongoing work to make Rust-based GPU drivers more viable.

In addition to the notable libcrypto optimizations and improvements merged during this first week of the Linux 7.1 merge window, the main cryptography subsystem pull was also merged. Notable here are the Intel QuickAssist (QAT) improvements.

The scheduler changes for Linux 7.1 are now in place and may bring performance benefits for at least some systems and workloads.

Merged this week for Linux 7.1 was a rework of the high resolution timer "HRTIMER" subsystem for reducing the overhead of frequently-armed timers, such as the HRTICK scheduler timer. The HRTICK scheduler timer is useful for enhancing system responsiveness and fairness.