Linux Kernel 7.2 Released With New Features and Expanded Hardware Support
Linux kernel 7.2 has been officially released, bringing cache-aware load balancing, HDMI 2.1 FRL support for AMDGPU, Rust support for S/390, and more.
The kernel also adds Rust support for the IBM System/390 (S/390) architecture, as well as a "Fair(er)" GPU scheduler. It introduces a 'zerocopy' library to Rust support for zero-cost memory manipulation, new hwcaps for the 2025 dpISA extensions on AArch64 (ARM64), and enables large folios by default for the Btrfs file system.
Other changes include Intel CPU model number support for the Panther Lake R processor series, improvements to the kernel's swap subsystem, support for multi-size transparent huge pages (mTHPs) in the khugepaged kernel thread, and support for compressed files in the SMB filesystem. The new NTFS filesystem introduced in kernel 7.1 has been improved, and there are devicetree updates for 64-bit NXP/Freescale and Qualcomm platforms. MPTCP signaling support for IPv6 addresses and GRO/GSO support for PPPoE are added, along with more SMP load-balancing updates.
The TCP authentication option has been implemented, and Thunderbolt networking has been improved. The KVM subsystem now supports AMD's "guest-mode execution trap" and Intel's "mode-based execution control" (MBEC) features. The NFS file system's default block size has been increased to 4MB on systems with at least 16GB RAM, and support for Intel Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX) has been added.