Linux 7.0 Release: Key Changes for Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS Architectures

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 7.0 on LKML:

The last week of the release followed the trend of “lots of small fixes,” but everything seems pretty benign, so I’ve tagged the final 7.0 and pushed it out.
I suspect AI tool usage will keep finding corner cases for a time, so this may be the “new normal” for a while. Only time will reveal.
This last week covered a bit of everything: networking (core and drivers), arch fixes, tooling and selftests, and various random fixes all over.
Let’s continue testing, and tomorrow the merge window for 7.1 opens. I already have four dozen pull requests pending – thanks to the proactive folks.
Linus

This follows the Linux 6.19 release approx. two months ago, which introduced PCIe link encryption, secure device authentication, BTRFS and EXT-4 file systems improvements, and HDR support color pipeline API, among other updates. Linux 7.0 isn’t a major release, but the “major” number updates after reaching 19. So, it’s Linux 7.0, not 6.20.

Notable changes in Linux 7.0

Noteworthy changes in Linux 7.0 include:

AI Coding Assistants documentation – Introduced documentation on AI coding tools. Humans remain responsible for reviewing AI-generated code and signaling “Assisted-by” for AI contributions:

Rust support is no longer experimental. Subsystem maintainers may exclude it from their subsystems.
New generic API for file IO error reporting – Standardizes error reporting to fsnotify for file systems.
Better swapping performance with swap table, phase II – Further optimizes the swapping code.
zram implements compressed data writeback – Allows direct writeback of zram-compressed data, saving CPU cycles and battery.