Abstract:
Linux founder Linus Torvalds recently announced the release of Linux 7.4-rc1, which is the first release candidate version of the Linux 7.4 series. This version was launched after the end of the two-week feature merge window, marking the official entry of kernel development into the testing and stabilization phase. In the coming weeks, the development team will focus on fixing issues and polishing newly added features in preparation for the final stable release.
According to Torvalds, he still has two pull requests pending in his inbox due to some schedule changes brought about by his time off. Although these contents may be included in subsequent releases, in order to avoid further delays in the first release candidate release, he decided to launch Linux 7.4-rc1 first. Whether these codes will eventually make their way into Linux 7.4 will likely be known during the rc2 phase.
Torvalds described this merger window as "very large (BIG)", and an important driving factor behind it is artificial intelligence-related development work. He said that it would be more satisfying to have a large amount of AI-driven or AI-related development content integrated during the merge window than to have a large influx of fixes in the subsequent release candidate stage. Although there may still be many AI-related problem fixes in the future testing phase, the impact is expected to be less than in the past.
At the same time, Torvalds also raised another possibility. He believes that many developers may expect Linux 7.4 to be the next-generation long-term support (LTS) kernel, and therefore hope to incorporate their new features into this version as soon as possible. If this judgment is true, then the next few candidate versions may still maintain a large scale, because developers still have a lot of features that need to be further improved and optimized.
Judging from specific data, Linux 7.4 received a total of about 20,000 code submissions in this merge window, while under normal circumstances it is usually about 15,000, and the overall scale is significantly higher than the average.
In addition, there is a special reason for this version's huge code change record. AMD imported a large number of hardware register definition files into the kernel, bloating the diff log significantly. Torvalds said that about one-third of the content in this patch set is actually AMD GPU-related register offsets and bitmask definitions.
In addition to these large updates, Linux 7.4-rc1 also brings improvements and updates in many areas such as drivers, processor architecture support, file systems, development tool chains, and core kernel components.
According to Linux kernel practice, in the next about two months, developers are expected to release a new candidate version every week, with a total of about seven to eight, before launching the final stable version of Linux 7.4.
At the same time, Linux 7.3.1 version has also been released recently. With the arrival of this maintenance update, Arch Linux-based distributions are expected to start providing corresponding upgrade packages soon. The Fedora distribution, which is known for quickly following up on kernel updates, is also expected to provide users with the latest kernel version earlier.
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