Linux Kernel News Archives

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 7.3-rc7 as we work toward the stable Linux 7.3 kernel release in two weeks.

Linux's Multi-Gen LRU "MGLRU" has already achieved nice performance gains for Linux in recent years by optimizing page reclaims and improves performance under memory pressure. The new MGLRU-FG patches aim to take things further.

Linaro engineer Vincent Guittot sent out a set of patches on Friday working on scheduling latency improvements, especially when multiple short slice tasks are running concurrently on the same system.

A proposal was posted this week to the Linux kernel mailing list by a Google engineer to make it easier for ARM64 Linux to adjust the kernel stack size. The motivation for doing so to configure the kernel stack size during boot time is on reducing system memory consumption.

In working toward the stable Linux 7.3 kernel release hopefully on 18 October, out today is Linux 7.3-rc5 as the newest weekly test candidate.

In addition to the Linux kernel's Zstd compression code being improved, the LZ4 compression code within the kernel tree is also seeing a separate set of enhancements.

Queued this week into the slab/for-next Git branch ahead of next month's Linux 7.4 merge window is a memory management change for refilling pre-filled sheaves from the barn. In some cases this yields wild improvements to specific synthetic benchmarks.

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem fixes for the week are heavier on the side with many fixes to these kernel graphics/display drivers ahead of Sunday's Linux 7.3-rc5 release.

While the Linux kernel continues to be bombarded with patches from AI/LLM agents, to date the kernel hasn't carried an AGENTS.md Markdown file with instructions catering to AI/LLM agents. But a patch set out today would finally introduce one.

The Linux kernel is having to introduce a new taint flag "TAINT_FORCED_BIND" to deal with fuzzing bots like Syzbot abusing Linux's bind/unbind sysfs functionality and generating bug reports for impractical and not at all relevant hardware/driver combinations.

In 2022 the SLOB allocator was deprecated and removed with Linux 6.4 a year later. SLOB was popular with embedded systems with minimal amounts of RAM, so as a result the CONFIG_SLUB_TINY Kconfig option was then added for configuring the slab allocator for a minimal memory footprint for systems with 16MB of RAM or less. The CONFIG_SLUB_TINY is now on the chopping block with a proposed rework to the allocator code for making the "tiny" memory handling a boot time option.

Sent out today was the latest weekly pull of drm-misc-next changes of feature material to queue in DRM-Next for Linux 7.4. Most notable in this week's pull request are a number of patches for enhancing the HDMI 2.0 handling in the DRM core infrastructure and display helpers.

A new proposal being discussed is introducing a Linux user-space API to be able to specify frame rate targets for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) handling on the Linux desktop.

The Igalia Linux/open-source consulting firm based out of A Coruña, Spain is celebrating twenty five years of contributions to upstream open-soure projects.

Linus Torvalds announced the release today of Linux 7.3-rc4. As usual for recent months, the fixes continue to be quite heavy and scattered all over the place driven in large part by AI/LLMs spotting various code defects. Overall though Linus Torvalds isn't too worried about Linux 7.3-rc4.

Ahead of the Linux 7.3-rc4 kernel release due out in the coming hours, an important batch of x86/x86_64 fixes have been merged to address a few outstanding issues.

The past few weeks we have eagerly been following a Linux kernel patch series after AI found some major bottlenecks in the Linux kernel build code. With AI helping to address these bottlenecks, Linux kernel build times are substantially reduced. These optimizations might be ready in time for Linux 7.4 for reducing incremental kernel build times as much as around 70%. This week the latest iteration of these patches were posted by Arm engineer Lorenzo Stoakes.

The idea has been talked about before but in 2026 still hasn't made it to the mainline Linux kernel.... Standardized reporting of video memory statistics that would work across different vendors / kernel graphics drivers. A new proposal was raised today in an effort to get a standardized interface established.

Arm engineer Christian Loehle sent out a patch series today proposing that the Linux scheduler code randomize its picking of equally shallow idle CPU cores. This randomization is showing to deliver a win at least for high CPU core counts for better distributing workloads.

A new patch series being worked on is enhancing the Linux kernel's hibernation allocator to allow for faster performance when hibernating the system.

Earlier this month I wrote about a patch series posted to the Linux kernel mailing list that addressed a lot of "hideous code" to make Linux kernel builds faster. A number of single-threaded bottlenecks were tracked down and fixed within the Linux kernel thanks to the assistance of AI. A second revision of those patches hit the mailing list this morning and there is hope they could be upstreamed for Linux 7.4.

Being merged after yesterday's Linux 7.3-rc3 release was an important fix for addressing a silent, user-space data loss bug that has existed in the kernel the past three years.

Out today is the third weekly release candidate of Linux 7.3 as this next kernel version works its way toward a stable release in the second half of October.

In addition to Usama Arif's recent Linux patches for addressing a major inefficiency within the Linux kernel's Zstd compression code, he also has a separate patch series destined for Linux 7.4 to further enhance the Zstd compression/decompression performance by avoiding redundant initialization.

Since being merged back during the Linux 7.2 cycle, the Cache Aware Scheduling code continues seeing more fixes as users test out this scheduling enhancement on different processors and system configurations.

An ARM Linux engineer leveraged AI/LLMs to help uncover some improvements to "significant speed up" the Linux kernel build times. In the process the LLM used generated "a lot of code, much of it hideous" but in the end was used to find some very significant time savings for faster kernel builds via more task parallelization in different areas of the kernel build process.

After the Linux 7.3 merge window concluded last weekend, today we are up to the Linux 7.3-rc2 test kernel release in working toward the stable v7.3 kernel during the second half of October.

Ahead of the Linux 7.3-rc2 kernel being released later today, a set of scheduler fixes have been sent out for this week's kernel test release. Most notable with the scheduler fixes are dealing with possible misfits for Cache-Aware Load Scheduling on hybrid CPUs like Intel Core (Ultra) processors.

Ahead of the Linux 7.3-rc2 kernel release due out later today, a merge causing a lot of code churn was pulled in by Linus Torvalds. This tree-wide effort converts more of the kmalloc() function calls over to the newer and superior kmalloc_obj() family of functions.

Being worked on for over two years has been the latest attempt for async device shutdown support for Linux for getting Linux systems -- especially servers with lots of hardware like many NVMe drives -- to shutdown faster. That work is now up to its 21st version as it works toward hopefully making it to the mainline kernel in the not too distant future.

While Rust programming language use may help with memory safety and other security advantages, the default Linux kernel configuration is now losing randomization of sensitive kernel structures if Rust support is present.

While Linux 7.3-rc1 only released this week and there are another roughly seven weeks to go until the official kernel release, Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman is already warning that it's likely to be another "rough" kernel cycle given the ongoing noise caused by AI/LLM with the increase in bug reports and kernel patches.

While the Linux 7.3 merge window officially closed on Sunday with the Linux 7.3-rc1 release, the Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" subsystem changes were mistakenly forgotten about during the two week window. The pull request ended up being sent out on Monday evening and the late feature changes were already merged to Git.

With Linus Torvalds remarking in the Linux 7.3-rc1 release announcement of the AMD kernel graphics driver changes for amounting around a third of the -rc1 changes due to the big AMD GPU register files for DCN 6.0 and other new IP additions, here are some fresh code stats at large.

Like clockwork, the Linux 7.3 merge window has concluded after two weeks and the Linux 7.3-rc1 kernel now available for testing.

With the proliferation of AI/LLM models analyzing the Linux kernel's vast codebase, there has been a surge in the number of CVEs per kernel release. After typically being around 500 CVEs fixed per release, we are now approaching 2,000 CVEs fixed per release and perhaps will break that threshold for Linux 7.3.

The char/misc changes were merged this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. While there is a lot of IIO driver churn as usual and updates to the likes of the Google Binder drivers, there continues to be the 2026 trend of removing old hardware drivers that are rarely updated these days and likely have no active users left on the mainline Linux kernel. This trend is further pushed along by the surplus of AI/LLM-generated bug reports and patches these days causing additional maintenance burden for these obsolete drivers.

Following last week's main set of memory management "MM" related updates for Linux 7.3, another batch of MM code updates were submitted and merged today as we prepare to close out the Linux 7.3 merge window. There are a few optimization patches that stand out along with other mostly small fixes/changes.

Patches sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list today can provide much more efficient Zstd compression and decompression by addressing a very unfortunate oversight in the existing code.

Last year a multi-kernel architecture was proposed for the Linux kernel to allow multiple independent kernel instances to co-exist on a single physical machine. Each kernel with "multikernel" Linux can run on dedicated CPU cores whole sharing the underlying hardware resources. Linux 7.0-mk2 released today with the kernel patched for this multi-kernel behavior.

The EFI updates were merged today for the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel. Most notable with the EFI updates is now enforcing a timeout foe EFI runtime service completions rather than potentially hanging indefinitely.

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.3 merge window. There is a lot of exciting GPU kernel driver improvements this cycle ranging from some notable enhancements to old AMD Radeon graphics hardware up through enabling support for some next-generation AMD graphics IP blocks to over on the Intel side where Nova Lake S graphics are being enabled by default.

Eric Biggers of Google continues carrying out great work on the Linux kernel crypto code. For Linux 7.3 he's landed work on new library APIs for most of the AES encryption modes used within the kernel. Moving forward this will open the door to more performance optimizations, reducing code duplication, and other enhancements.

The extensible scheduler framework "sched_ext" that allows for custom schedulers as BPF programs has been working on sub-scheduler support in recent kernel cycles. With Linux 7.3, sub-scheduler support is now deemed feature complete.

The highlight of this week's x86/mm pull request of changes for the Linux 7.3 kernel are fixes that reduce the time that the TLB flushing code has interrupts disabled. This helps significantly with latency-sensitive workloads but Intel engineer Dave Hansen noted in the pull request that "it's certainly something to keep an eye on" in looking out for any regressions.

At a time when Linux continues dropping older hardware drivers due to the influx of AI/LLM-generated bug reports and patches for hardware extremely unlikely to be used with modern versions of the mainline Linux kernel, Voodoo graphics cards and vintage Atari computers are seeing some reprieve with the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel release.

Merged this week for the Linux 7.3 kernel was a big clean-up to the stack randomization code for better security on Linux systems and helping unify some of the architecture-specific code.

The Linux kernel has supported the CONFIG_COMPAT_32BIT_TIME Kconfig build time option for optionally disabling of legacy 32-bit time system call support. This is intended to disable the code that uses a 32-bit integer for time that is thus not Year 2038 safe, but at the cost of breaking compatibility for legacy 32-bit applications. Even if building without Linux 32-bit time support, it turns out some 32-bit time code persisted but that is now being fixed with Linux 7.3.

Andrew Morton on Tuesday sent out all of the memory management "MM" updates for the Linux 7.3 merge window. The MM pull was particularly heavy as he noted 1,250 "added-to-MM" emails were sent out this cycle compared to 920 the prior cycle. With a lot of patch churn, he also turned to Google's Gemini AI for writing his patch summaries. In going through the very verbose AI-generated summary, there are two patch series that get me excited on the performance front with Linux 7.3.

The exciting set of scheduler updates have been merged for the Linux 7.3 merge window.