KernelNewbies:

Linux 7.2 changelog.

Summary:

1. Prominent features

1.1. Faster performance and less cache misses with cache-aware task scheduling

This release introduces cache-aware load balancing of tasks, with the goal of co-locating tasks that share data (ie. threads of the same process) within the same Last Level Cache domain. By improving cache locality, the scheduler can reduce cache bouncing and cache misses, ultimately improving data access efficiency.

Recommended LWN article: Cache awareness for the CPU scheduler

1.2. Better memory reclaiming, for better performance

Memory reclaiming, which is the part of the kernel that decides which parts of the memory should be sent to the swap or evicted from memory, has been improved. This release cleans up and slightly improve MGLRU's reclaim loop and dirty writeback handling. As a result, we can see an up to ~30% increase in some workloads like MongoDB with YCSB and a huge decrease in file refault, no swap involved. Other common benchmarks have no regression, and LOC is reduced, with less unexpected OOM, too.

2. Core (various)

3. File systems

4. Memory management

5. Block layer

6. Tracing, perf and BPF

7. Virtualization

8. Cryptography

9. Security

10. Networking

11. Architectures

12. Drivers

12.1. Graphics

12.2. Power Management

12.3. Storage

12.4. Drivers in the Staging area

12.5. Networking

12.6. Audio

12.7. Tablets, touch screens, keyboards, mouses

12.8. TV tuners, webcams, video capturers

12.9. Serial

12.10. Universal Serial Bus

12.11. Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI)

12.12. Watchdog

12.13. CPU Frequency scaling

12.14. Voltage, current regulators, power capping, power supply

12.15. Real Time Clock (RTC)

12.16. Pin Controllers (pinctrl)

12.17. Multi Media Card (MMC)

12.18. Memory Technology Devices (MTD)

12.19. Industrial I/O (iio)

12.20. Multi Function Devices (MFD)

12.21. Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM)

12.22. Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C + I3C)

12.23. Hardware monitoring (hwmon)

12.24. General Purpose I/O (gpio)

12.25. Leds

12.26. DMA engines

12.27. Cryptography hardware acceleration

12.28. PCI

12.29. Clock

12.30. PHY ("physical layer" framework)

12.31. EDAC (Error Detection And Correction)

12.32. Various

13. List of Pull Requests

14. Other news sites

KernelNewbies: Linux_7.2 (last edited 2026-07-25 11:36:31 by diegocalleja)