Linux 7.2-rc7 Released Following Another Exhausting AI-Driven Week

Linux 7.2-rc7 is now available for testing as we close in on the official Linux 7.2 release hopefully next weekend.

By the time the Linux kernel typically hits a -rc7 release things have usually settled quite well. But in today's world of AI/LLM coding/review agents, the kernel activity continues at an all-time high. Tons of bug fixes continued to trickle in across the kernel spectrum for all sorts of issues. The HWMON hardware monitoring subsystem saw several critical and high severity bug fixes, on the memory management side was a nasty race condition leading to a use-after-free in the kernel for the past eight years, Btrfs restored its fixup worker infrastructure to deal with silent data loss, lots of AI patches in the networking realm, and the kernel was patched for the Safe RET Interrupt Vulnerability.

Linus Torvalds wrote in the 7.2-rc7 announcement:

"Another week, another -rc.

I can't say that I'm exactly thrilled about the size of this all, but it is what it is: the new normal with a lot of fixes, many of them due to review by various AI tools.

And nothing looks particularly scary per se - it's just that there's a lot here. Most of it is fairly small, although we have a couple of larger diffs: s390/zcrypt fixes stand out in the diffstat, and so does btrfs bringing back the fixup worker infrastructure. And some netfilter ipset fixes.

But aside from a few places like that, most of this is just lots of tiny fixes. It's pretty much spread all over - drivers (gpu, sound, networking, you name it), filesystems, core networking, arch code..

I don't currently see any value in delaying the 7.2 release, so I would expect that to happen next weekend unless something really bad pops up."

Hopefully Linux 7.2 stable will manage to make it out next Sunday, 16 August, otherwise it will be delayed one week if a Linux 7.2-rc8 is warranted. When this new kernel does release, there are a lot of new features/changes with Linux 7.2. The Linux 7.2 kernel is also what will be the default kernel of the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release and other upcoming Linux distribution releases.