Kernel 7.2: RK3588 media, smarter GPU memory, and Rust foundations
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Kernel 7.2: RK3588 media, smarter GPU memory, and Rust foundations
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18/08/2026<br>-->
Posted on 18/08/2026 by Deborah Brouwer
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Kernel 7.2: RK3588 media, smarter GPU memory, and Rust foundations
Posted on 18/08/2026 by Deborah Brouwer<br>--><br>Deborah Brouwer<br>August 18, 2026
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Linux kernel 7.2 has been released, bringing another broad collection of architecture, memory-management, filesystem, security, and hardware-support improvements. For Rust watchers, the momentum continues in v7.2 with the import of the zerocopy crate into kernel source code; the introduction of the GPUVM abstraction for Rust GPU drivers; s390 architecture wiring into the Rust build system; and the driver-core infrastructure introducing compile-time lifetime checks between drivers and their device resources.
In the core kernel, the CPU scheduler now has cache-aware load balancing, while the slab allocator received additional protection against buffer-overflow attacks using Clang allocation tokens. To see a summary of these and many other interesting improvements from the v7.2 release, see LWN’s summaries:
The first half of the 7.2 merge window
The rest of the merge window
Collabora engineers authored 102 patches included in this cycle. Their work spans graphics, media, Rust, virtualization, networking, power management, and SoC enablement.
Advancing upstream media support for RK3588
Collabora continued to add features and support for Rockchip’s RK3588 platform in Linux 7.2.
Michael Riesch added initial support for the RK3588 Video Capture (VICAP) unit to the RKCIF driver. VICAP is an essential part of the RK3588 camera interface providing one DVP, six MIPI CSI-2 receivers, scale/crop units, and a data path multiplexer. With RK3588 VICAP support, raw sensor images can now be streamed using the upstream media stack. The work was tested on a Radxa ROCK 5B+ with two Radxa 4K cameras attached. This series provides the foundation for future integration with the RK3588 image signal processor (ISP).
Benjamin Gaignard added upstream support for the VeriSilicon IOMMU, which is found in front of hardware encoder and decoder blocks in several SoCs using VeriSilicon IP. The IOMMU translates the memory addresses used by those codec blocks and limits which areas of system memory they can access. The series initially supports the IOMMU implementation found on the Rockchip RK3588 SoC. It was tested with AV1 decoding using the stateless VPU driver and Fluster.
Detlev Casanova improved the Rockchip video decoder by replacing heavily unaligned bitfield structures with a shared bitwriter. The previous representation of hardware-control buffers could cause the compiler to generate unnecessarily large stack frames or, in some cases, hang during compilation. Detlev introduced a driver-wide bitwriter helper, replaced the separate H.264 and HEVC bitwriters, and converted the shared reference-picture-set and VDPU383 parameter buffers to use it. This makes the packed hardware layouts explicit, reduces duplicated code, and improves build reliability across compilers and architectures.
Panthor gains reclaimable GPU memory
Modern browsers and graphics workloads can allocate large amounts of system memory for the GPU to use. A GPU driver must cooperate with the kernel’s memory-management system when the machine comes under pressure. Until now, the Panthor driver could not reclaim its GPU buffer objects. Boris Brezillon has added a GEM shrinker to Panthor so the system can reclaim GPU memory. The driver can now evict inactive GPU mappings and swap their backing pages out when the system needs memory. This happens transparently to applications and was tested with IGT as well as Chromium workloads deliberately pushed into reclaim and swap activity.
Boris Brezillon also restructured Panthor’s GEM implementation to stop using the drm_gem_shmem_object because its handling of sub-resources and their lifetimes prevented buffer-object reclaim. This work could also serve as the basis for a new gem-uma (Unified Memory Architecture) component-based library. The current implementation preserves buffer contents through swap; future improvements could allow disposable allocations such as tiler-heap chunks to be discarded and recreated instead.
Memory reclaim landed alongside a substantial set of Panthor reliability improvements from Boris and other contributors. These address interrupt sequencing, suspend and...