Linux 7.2 Features Expected: Apple M3, Initial AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL, USB4STREAM, Cache Aware Scheduling
Based on my monitoring of the mailing lists and the "-next" Git branches, below is a look at some of the new feature material for Linux 7.2. There is always the possibility of last minute issues or Linus Torvalds finding reasons with particular bits of code and refusing to pull, but overall here is a large part of what is expected to be submitted for the Linux 7.2 merge window:
- Linux 7.2 will be able to boot on Apple M3 Macs but the actual support is very limited... It will boot to console but not much more yet and far from end-user working experience for daily driving.
- Cache Aware Scheduling looks like it will land for some nice performance improvements for modern AMD and Intel hardware.
- The AMD ISP4 driver should finally be upstreamed for enabling the web camera on the HP ZBook Ultra G1a and other future high-end AMD Ryzen laptops.
- OPENAT2_REGULAR as a new flag to avoid tricking secure programs.
- Initial support for HDMI 2.1 FRL in AMDGPU driver as part of that bring-up working toward a complete HDMI 2.1 implementation at long last within the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack.
- Introducing the AMDGPU DC Power Module to better align with the Radeon display power management behavior on Microsoft Windows.
- Enablement of next-gen AMD graphics hardware IP albeit due to the block-by-block versioning it's not clear what product plans it associates to.
- Performance improvements for Btrfs as well as huge folios support in Btrfs.
- FSERROR reporting support for F2FS.
- USB4STREAM for nifty Thunderbolt/USB4 use-cases developed by Intel.
- Deprecating AF_ALG due to its massive attack surface.
- Exposing voltage inputs for Raspberry Pi SBCs.
- Continued work on the NVIDIA Nova driver, including work toward the Blackwell and Hopper enablement.
- Nouveau driver support for the NVIDIA GA100 albeit the user-space support for that compute accelerator is right now limited.
- Improvements for the AMDGPU graphics driver on POWER and ARM with non-4K page size kernels.
- Setting the default DRM scheduler priority to "fair".
- Intel Diamond Rapids EDAC driver changes.
- Intel TDX Runtime updates looks like it will be in place for Linux 7.2 to allow for less server reboots.
- Intel WiFi 8 UHR preparations within the IWLWIFI driver for that next-gen WiFi spec.
- Preparations for APX support in KVM VMs for the Advanced Performance Expectations, but that enablement is still ongoing.
- Intel Key Protection Technology "KPT" for next-gen QAT accelerators.
- Intel DRM Background Color Property support.
- Preparing for multiple Intel Crescent Island accelerator SKUs.
- Intel graphics driver Panel Replay Tunneling support.
- A fix for old Intel Sandy Bridge integrated graphics.
- Enabling SR-IOV support for Nova Lake Xe3P graphics.
- ACPI CPPC v4 support that was worked on by NVIDIA engineers.
- Airoha AN8801R Gigabit Ethernet PHY driver is among the new network hardware support being upstreamed. Also coming for Linux 7.2 is Realtek RTL8159 10GbE USB Ethernet support.
- Dropping ARCnet support for old ISA and PCMCIA hardware.
- Other old hardware removal includes dropping an ISA speech synthesizer driver.
- ESWIN SoC support by default in RISC-V defconfig kernel builds.
- Working WiFi for the BeagleV Ahead and Lichee Pi 4a RISC-V boards.
- More SpacemiT K1 and K3 support is being upstreamed as more work on the RISC-V side.
- AMD support in the UFS host controller PCI driver for the unspecified AMD hardware.
- Expandable heap support for the AMDXDNA driver for Ryzen AI NPUs.
- AMDXDNA is enabling morre AIE4 NPU hardware support.
- New power features for the AMD and Intel NPU drivers.
- TSC will be a hard requirement for x86 CPUs. But with the Time Stamp Counter being around for years now that the i486 kernel support is being stripped out, ultimately its impact is minimal but will allow for some code cleaning.
- Retiring of AMD K5 CPU support as well as retiring AMD Elan SoCs. AMD Geode support is also being orphaned.
- The OneXPlayer configuration driver looks like it's ready for mainline to benefit the OneXPlayer handheld gaming devices.
- The ARCTIC Fan Controller USB driver will be upstreamed for that seemingly unreleased ARCTIC fan controller.
- Support for Switchtec PCIe Gen6 switches.
Making Linux 7.2 all the more exciting is that it's expected to be the default kernel of Ubuntu 26.10 and Fedora 45.
Stay tuned to Phoronix for more coverage during the Linux 7.2 merge window followed by the start of Linux 7.2 kernel performance benchmarking.
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