On February 22, Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, announced the end of the Linux 7.0 merge window and officially released the first candidate version, Linux 7.0-rc1. Although the version number crossing into "7.0" is more of a follow-up to its habit of large version number upgrades after the x.19 version, this version is full of features and improvements.
Linux 7.0 is considered to be an important kernel version for many mainstream distributions, and is expected to be the default kernel for distributions such as Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora 44, which makes this release particularly interesting. In terms of hardware support, Linux 7.0 continues to strengthen its adaptation to new generation processors, including more enablement work for Intel Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids processors, and also further improves support for AMD Zen 6 architecture. In addition to the x86 camp, the new version also brings driver updates to more platforms, such as further upstream integration of Qualcomm Snapdragon X2-related support, and the expansion of a large number of new hardware drivers. In terms of graphics cards, support for the upcoming new generation of AMD graphics hardware has been added to the kernel, paving the way for subsequent graphics card releases.
At the subsystem and functional level, Linux 7.0 brings improvements to various file systems and adds Apple USB Type-C PHY support, which enhances the compatibility and functionality of some Apple devices at the USB-C physical layer. At the same time, the kernel also introduces a number of performance optimizations, laptop-related driver enhancements, multi-channel SPI support, Octal DTR mode for SPI NAND, sensor monitoring support for more ASUS motherboards, non-blocking timestamps, standardized general I/O error reporting and other new features. It is worth mentioning that the long-term "experimental" phase of the Rust language has also officially come to an end in this version, and the Linux kernel has clearly acknowledged that support for Rust will continue to exist as a long-term retained feature.
In terms of performance, Linux 7.0 has shown attractive improvements. For example, on the AMD EPYC server platform, the performance of PostgreSQL has been greatly improved, and related tests have shown significant gains in database load. In terms of file systems, exFAT's sequential read performance has been optimized, F2FS has received multiple enhancements, and EXT4 has also been improved in concurrent direct I/O write scenarios. The memory management subsystem is also optimized, supplemented by improvements in performance and scalability of the scheduler, to provide better performance for multi-core, high-concurrency scenarios. In addition, Intel TSX enables automatic mode by default, and the Nouveau driver re-enables large page support to help NVK's graphics performance.
Currently, Linux 7.0-rc1 has been released through the Git tag, and the source code is available from git.kernel.org:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=6de23f81a5e08be8fbf5e8d7e9febc72a5b5f27f