Linus Torvalds has released the second release candidate for the upcoming Linux 7.2. The good news is that everything looks pretty normal; this RC2 is actually smaller than the RC2 in Linux 7.1. Recent RCs have been larger due to AI use, but Linus Torvalds has recently told people off for their use of AI, which could be contributing to the reduction in size.
Everything looking normal at this stage is an excellent bit of news because it means we are more likely to get Linux 7.2 after RC7 instead of a possible RC8 if there are delays. Ultimately, that means you will get it on your computer a week quicker.
Torvalds did note one “slightly unusual” thing this week. He said there had been a header file split where mod_devicetable.h was split into multiple per-subsystem device-id headers. He noted that this cleanup is welcome because before, whenever it was touched, it would cause almost everything to be recompiled, so it could save developers time in the future.
In terms of changes in this release, we got some patches from Pawan Gupta to mitigate BPF JIT spraying on x86 architectures, including forcing an Indirect Branch Prediction Barrier (IBPB) flush on BPF JIT memory allocations to prevent speculative execution exploits.
It also brings stability fixes for the new ARM Mali Panthor driver that address out-of-memory situations and memory leak cleanups during state eviction. There are also core filesystem fixes and kernel architecture fixes.
You can find the remainder of the shortlog here.