SUMMARYLinux kernel 7.2 has been officially released with a wide range of new features and hardware support updates. The release adds cache-aware load balancing, initial HDMI 2.1 FRL support for AMDGPU, Rust support for IBM System/390, improvements to Btrfs, NTFS, SMB, and swap handling, and networking updates including MPTCP IPv6 signaling and TCP authentication. It also expands support for Intel Panther Lake processors, Thunderbolt networking, and virtualization features in KVM, including AMD and Intel execution controls.
Linux Kernel 7.2 has just been officially released with a slew of new features, reports the blog 9to5Linux.
Highlights of Linux 7.2 "include cache-aware load-balancing support, initial HDMI 2.1 FRL support to the AMDGPU driver, support for devres-based management of ACPI notify handlers, initial CRI platform support for the Intel Xe driver, and Rust support for the IBM System/390 (S/390) architecture."
Linux kernel 7.2 also introduces a "Fair(er)" GPU scheduler, support for the 'zerocopy' library to Rust support to make zero-cost memory manipulation effortless, new hwcaps for the 2025 dpISA extensions on the AArch64 (ARM64) architecture, and enables large folios by default for the Btrfs file system. It also brings Intel CPU model number support for Panther Lake R processor series, improvements to the kernel's swap subsystem, support for multi-size transparent huge pages (mTHPs) to the khugepaged kernel thread, and support for compressed files to the SMB filesystem. On top of that, Linux 7.2 improves the new NTFS filesystem introduced in Linux kernel 7.1, adds devicetree updates for 64-bit NXP/Freescale and Qualcomm platforms, introduces MPTCP signaling support for IPv6 addresses, adds GRO/GSO support for PPPoE, and brings more SMP load-balancing updates... [T]he TCP authentication option has been implemented, and there are also some Thunderbolt networking improvements. Also worth mentioning is that the KVM subsystem has received support for AMD's "guest-mode execution trap" and Intel's "mode-based execution control" (MBEC) features, the NFS file system's default block size was bumped to 4MB on systems with at least 16GB RAM, and support for the Intel Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX) feature has been added.
Thanks to Slashdot reader prisoninmate for bring the news.