The 7.2 kernel has been released [LWN.net]

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The 7.2 kernel has been released

[Posted August 16, 2026 by corbet]

The 7.2 kernel has been released.<br>Linus said:

Well, this last week of the release was - once again - bigger than<br>I would have wished for, but hey, with the whole "new normal"<br>thing, if I delayed releases for that reason we'd probably never<br>have a release at all.

Significant features in this release include<br>common<br>attributes support in the bpf() system call,<br>cache-aware load balancing for the CPU<br>scheduler,<br>large-folio support in the Btrfs filesystem,<br>further swap subsystem improvements,<br>improvements to the Landlock security module,<br>support for block devices with inline encryption hardware via the dm-inlinecrypt<br>device-mapper target, and much more.<br>See the LWN merge window summaries<br>(part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 7.2 page<br>for more information.

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more time to bake

Posted Aug 17, 2026 2:51 UTC (Mon)<br>by rolexhamster (guest, #158445)<br>[Link]

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.

That sounds like a cop-out. If the kernel needs more a little more time to bake, then so be it. The quality of recent .0 releases has anectodally dropped compared to say 6 to 12 months ago.

Maybe all the recent LLM based bug "finding" is correcting some surface-level symptoms, while at the same time destabilizing the codebase via subtly breaking tacit or under-documented assumptions and data flows.

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