The newest point release for Linux is here a few months after the last one, and the time in-between was not spent idly. Scheduler work that took over a year finally came together, several pieces of hardware got proper support, and a series of 2023 MacBooks can finally boot Linux.
During all this, Linus Torvalds' transition from treating AI as noise for years to slowly warming up to it has been something of a wildcard entry.
Anyhow, let's see what this point release has to offer.
What's new in this release? #
AMD's platform driver changes lean heavily on Zen 6 prep. The Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI) driver adds v3 ranking table support for dynamic core rankings, and the power management controller driver adds support for Family 1Ah Model 80H SoCs (a Zen 6-focused change, basically).
What Ubuntu's OEM kernel had been carrying out of tree is now in. The long-awaited AMD ISP4 driver completes webcam support for the HP ZBook Ultra G1a and other upcoming Ryzen laptops.
Similarly, AMDGPU has gained initial HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link support (FRL), years after the HDMI Forum blocked the feature from the open source driver.
For Intel, most of this round's EDAC work targets next-gen Xeon Diamond Rapids chips, adding sub-memory channel awareness and Rank Retry Logic to preserve data integrity during memory errors. Nova Lake H and Panther Lake H gain in-band ECC error reporting through the IGEN6 driver. Linux 7.2 also continues clearing out old i486 chunks that started disappearing in 7.1 and makes TSC and CX8 support unconditional on x86. TDX modules can now update at runtime, similar to CPU microcode, so security fixes no longer force a full reboot on TDX-enabled systems.
Another highlight of this kernel release has been Cache Aware Scheduling, which was merged after more than a year of work, landing behind the CONFIG_SCHED_CACHE
option.
Without cache awareness, the scheduler can end up scattering related tasks across zones on chips with multiple last-level caches (LLCs). This feature groups those tasks onto cores within the same LLC instead.
Laptop support also sees some improvements that include new ASUS ROG Strix G16 2025, Zephyrus G14 2023/2025, and TUF Gaming F16 support. Lenovo laptops gain more configurable attributes along with WMI battery charge limiting, and Microsoft's Surface Pro 12-inch gets platform driver support.
A few smaller changes round things out:
- Nouveau adds support for the NVIDIA GA100 compute accelerator via GSP. - Btrfs large folio support left experimental statusand is now on by default, and huge folios up to 2M arrive as a new experimental option. - RISC-V builds now enable the ESWIN SoCby default, letting them boot on SiFive'sHiFive Premier P550. - Networking brings more Wi-Fi Awareand WiFi 8/UHR groundwork, plus 10Gbit andEEEsupport in the Realtek R8152 driver. Apple M3MacBooks can boot the mainline kernel for the first time, though only to a serial console so far. TheAsahi Linuxdevs worked hard to deliver this.- A new USB4STREAM protocolthat lets two machines move data directly over a USB4 or Thunderbolt cable.
Announcing the release, Linus Torvalds said that: Well, this last week of the release was - once again - bigger than I would have wished for, but hey, with the whole "new normal" thing, if I delayed releases for that reason we'd probably never have a release at all.
There are a number of fairly late reverts - the drm scheduling reverts stand out, but there's a few other ones in here too. It may not be pretty, but it's the correct way to deal with "oh, that code wasn't ready and caused problems". People will be trying that again later.
Is it for you? #
It's good to get excited about a new kernel release, but compiling the kernel or installing a new one is usually considered for intermediate to expert levels of skill. If this release fills some gap you faced with earlier kernels, then you should definitely go for it.
But not without knowing the risks. Our guide for installing the latest Linux kernel on Ubuntu clearly spells out the pitfalls.
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