Linux 7.0-rc3 is out as the latest weekly test candidate in leading up to the stable Linux 7.0 release in mid-April.
It’s been another week of bug and regression fixing for Linux 7.0. Besides the usual code churn around mostly mundane bugs/regressions, a few items that stand out include a slab performance fix for a “severe” regression, new Dell / ASUS / OneXPlayer / Lenovo hardware support via the different x86 platform drivers, a scoped user access usage that shows a ~1.5% increase in network performance on AMD Zen 2 CPUs, fixing battery reporting for the Apple Magic Trackpad 2, landing IBPB-On-Entry for AMD SEV-SNP guest VMs, and fixing Sub-NUMA Clustering “SNC” topology for newer Intel CPUs. The IBPB-On-Entry for SEV-SNP VMs is a security feature found with the latest AMD EPYC Zen 5 server processors.
Those changes this week are on top of all the great new features and changes of Linux 7.0. Linux 7.0 is the kernel that will be the default for the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora 44.
Last week Linus Torvalds was not happy with how big Linux 7.0-rc2 ended up. Linus Torvalds commented in this afternoon’s 7.0-rc3 announcement:
“So -rc2 was big – some of the biggest in recent history – but I suspected it was mainly due to random timing and just happenstance.
Not so.
Because rc3 is big too. Repeat after me: “some of the biggest in recent history”. It’s bigger than rc2, which is admittedly not unusual in itself, because rc2 tends to be pretty small as people take a breather after the merge window and it takes a while to find issues.
But when rc2 was already fairly big, having rc3 then be even bigger makes me think something is up.
Now, the likely “something” is probably just that 6.19 dragged out an extra week with that rc8 release, so I’m not exactly worried. But I most definitely hope things start calming down.
Now, admittedly one reason I don’t worry too much is that a rather big portion of rc3 is selftests (almost a fifth of the patch), and nothing in the rest really looks particularly scary. Many of the commits in here are trivial – small cleanups or adding hardware IDs or quirks etc.
There’s just more commits than is the norm at this point.
So it’s still pretty early in the release cycle, and it just feels a bit busier than I’d like. But nothing particularly stands out or looks bad.
Please keep testing, and let’s hope we’re approaching the calming down period and just haven’t quite gotten there yet.”
Hopefully Linux 7.0 ends up calming down soon especially with the tight Ubuntu 26.04 LTS timeline and Ubuntu will ship Linux 7.0 even if the stable release is not out in time for its kernel freeze.