Linux 7.1 → 7.3

Processors & architecture cpu / arch

• Intel FRED enabled by default — Flexible Return and Event Delivery, previously behind fred=on. A win on Panther Lake and upcoming Diamond Rapids / Zen 6.
• Intel LASS (Linear Address Space Separation) deemed in good shape.
• Real-time "RT" kernel builds on 32-bit ARM — mainline, no out-of-tree patches needed. AArch64 already had this.
• 12 new SoCs plus other ARM and RISC-V platform support.
• AMD CPPC performance priority and dynamic/raw EPP handling.
• Intel QAT Zstd — compression offload for Gen4/Gen5, native compress + decompress for Gen6 / Diamond Rapids, plus QuickAssist Gen6 improvements.
• AMD SBI driver and new SMCA bank types preparing for EPYC Venice.
• Very experimental pKVM protected guests with KVM; KVM also exposes AVX-512 BMM to guests.
• HIGHMEM support and other LoongArch improvements.
• Workaround for the Arm C1-Pro erratum; x86 aligns with other arches on custom restart handlers.
• x86_energy_perf_policy gains Intel SoC slider support for Panther Lake.

Performance & memory management perf / mm

• Swap-table rework — the swap count comes from the swap table directly, dropping the static swap_map and cutting ~30% of static swap metadata memory.
• WQ_AFFN_CACHE_SHARD — workqueue improvement for CPUs with many cores per LLC.
• HRTIMER overhaul of the high-resolution timer code.
• Scheduler improvements, plus idle SMT sibling handling in sched_ext.
• Sheaves performance regression fixed; crypto enables more optimizations by default.
• Some changes may hurt 32-bit systems as 64-bit capability gets prioritized.

Storage & filesystems storage / fs

• New NTFS driver introduced — aims to beat both the existing kernel and FUSE-based NTFS options on performance and capability. Paragon's NTFS3 got fixes in parallel.
• ARM64 NEON-accelerated CRC64-NVMe for much better performance.
• T10 PI data-integrity handling revamped for better read performance.
• exFAT reduces file fragmentation; JFS data-integrity hardening.
• RAID fixes and io_uring enhancements; XFS / EXT4 / F2FS fixes with no major standouts.
• Many Apple HFS / HFS+ driver fixes.
• FSMOUNT_NAMESPACE as a new fsmount() flag.

Graphics & accelerators graphics

• AMDGPU DC support for GCN 1.1 APUs — Kaveri-era "Sea Islands" APUs now default to AMDGPU over legacy Radeon, closing that gap at last.
• Intel Nova Lake P graphics enablement begins.
• Intel Xe copes better with vRAM pressure / OOM via a new user-space interface; transparent hugepages for device pages aid SVM.
• Ryzen AI NPU power-estimate reporting and per-process memory queries in AMDXDNA.
• New Coreboot framebuffer DRM driver; assorted other DRM work.

Networking networking

• UDP-Lite retired — the remaining, modern UDP code should be faster for it.
• IPv6 can no longer be built as a standalone module.
• Intel IRDMA gains GEN4 hardware support.
• RTL8157 5Gbit and RTL8125cp ASICs; many MediaTek MT76 WiFi improvements.

Laptops & other hardware hardware

• Apple SMC power driver — battery/power metrics for M-series MacBooks on mainline. Sound code also adds bus keepers toward better Apple Silicon audio.
• Lenovo Yoga fan driver covering Yoga, Legion, Flex, Slim and IdeaPad models; new Legion Go drivers mainlined.
• Steam Deck OLED audio fixed after two years broken on mainline.
• New Bitland MIFS WMI driver — ACPI platform profiles, hwmon, keyboard backlight for Chinese laptops.
• More TUXEDO / Uniwill OEM features; improved ThinkPad TrackPoint doubletap.
• Sensor monitoring for more ASUS motherboards; PCIe M.2 power sequencing for Key-E connectors.
• New media drivers — more RealSense depth cameras, NVIDIA Tegra additions; more Sony Rock Band hardware; Line6 POD HD PRO and NexiGo N930W audio.

Core, tooling & Rust core / tooling

• Child auto-reap and PIDFD auto-kill flags for clone3().
• user.* xattrs on sockets — originally requested by GNOME and systemd developers.
• Hung-task detector counter can be reset without a reboot by zeroing /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_detect_count.
• Experimental Rust inlining-helper option for performance; minimum Rust version raised.
• MMC subsystem changes merged after being rejected in the 7.0 window; many first-time contributors via staging.

overview sources:  7.1 feature overview · 7.1 released · It's FOSS

Processors & architecture cpu / arch

• Intel TDX runtime updates — apply security updates to Trusted Domain Extensions without a reboot.
• Apple M3 devices can boot on mainline, though not yet at a practically useful stage.
• More Zen 6 preparation; AMD readies "substantial design changes" for next-gen audio co-processor IP.
• Panther Lake R introduced as the rugged Panther Lake variant; Intel EDAC preps for Diamond Rapids and Nova Lake H.
• RISC-V reduces kernel startup overhead and enables ESWIN SoCs by default; the 64-bit core limit rises 64 → 256.
• ARM64 NEON CRC64 intrinsics now work on 32-bit ARM. ARM64 itself was quiet — developers were flooded with AI-fueled fixes.
• i486 phase-out continues; various power-management improvements.

Scheduler, performance & memory perf / mm

• Cache Aware Scheduling merged — better task placement on CPUs with multiple LLC domains; measurable gains across various processors and workloads.
• MGLRU improvement worth 30–100% higher MongoDB throughput in the patch authors' benchmarks.
• Reading /proc/filesystems up to 444% faster.
• Much faster poll performance and localhost networking speed-ups.
• Improved anonymous pipe performance for shell pipelines.
• Significantly lower container exit/unmount latency; more allocator optimizations.
• "Disgusting" sched_ext code restructured, with sub-scheduler support in progress.

Storage & filesystems storage / fs

• The XFS zone allocator is no longer experimental.
• OPENAT2_REGULAR — restrict a program to opening regular files only, so it can't be tricked into anything else.
• New documentation tightening requirements for new filesystems, to curb further proliferation.
• Btrfs enables large folios by default; iomap gains for EXT4 and XFS; various EXT4 improvements.
• Reduced F2FS memory footprint plus FSERROR integration for filesystem error reporting.
• iomap conversion for exFAT; hardening for the new NTFS driver; NTFS3 bug fixes.
• SMB2 compression for the KSMBD server.
• Better communication of case-folding behavior for Windows NFS compatibility; many io_uring, NVMe and block improvements.

Graphics graphics

• AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL support at long last, toward full upstream HDMI 2.1.
• New AMDGPU DC power module; next-gen graphics IP and next-gen NPU hardware enablement.
• Intel preps multiple Crescent Island SKUs; DRM background color property; faster Panther Lake Xe3 / Arc B390.
• Nouveau supports the NVIDIA GA100 accelerator; NVIDIA begins preparing "Blackwell-Next".
• The DRM scheduler switched to a fair default, then reverted to FIFO over regressions.

Networking networking

• WiFi Aware and WiFi 8 / UHR enablement, with iwlwifi getting ready for WiFi 8 hardware.
• Realtek RTL8159 ASIC support — already shipping in 10Gbps USB network adapters.
• RTL8723BS cleanup continues after nearly a decade in staging.

Security security

• IMA and EVM post-quantum ML-DSA signature support in the integrity subsystem.
• Intel Key Protection Technology (KPT) for next-gen QAT devices.
• Protection against maliciously crafted or corrupted perf data; DoS protection around arming timers in the past.
• BPF hardened against JIT-spraying attacks.

Hardware, laptops & handhelds hardware

• USB4STREAM — a new Intel protocol for quickly sending data between USB4/Thunderbolt-connected systems.
• The AMD ISP4 driver merged, finally enabling the webcam on the HP ZBook Ultra G1a and future high-end Ryzen laptops.
• OneXPlayer configuration driver mainlined thanks to Valve; many HP, ASUS and Lenovo platform-driver additions.
• New Wacom W9000 pen-touchscreen driver; a charger driver for the 14-year-old Surface RT.
• PCI fix for devices inadvertently restricted to 2.5 GT/s; 8250/16550 UART modernization.
• New ARCTIC fan controller driver; more ASUS and ASRock sensor monitoring.

Core, tooling & Rust core / tooling

• The strncpy API is finally gone — six years and 360+ patches of work.
• Rust Zerocopy library introduced to help eliminate more unsafe Rust.
• LLVM/Clang build requirements raised, with distributed ThinLTO support added.
• KUnit now supports JUnit XML output.

overview sources:  7.2 feature overview · 7.2 released · best features