After two months of development, Linus Torvalds presented kernel release Linux 7.0. Among the most notable changes: rules for using AI assistants, transferring Rust to the main kernel capabilities, increasing paging performance, enabling PREEMPT_LAZY mode by default, support for filters for io_uring operations, new Nullfs file system, fserror infrastructure, XFS monitoring tools, support for remapping in Btrfs, enabling NFS 4.1 version by default, integration of the post-quantum cryptographic algorithm ML-DSA, activation of AccECN, initial support for WiFi 8.
The number 7.0 was assigned because there were enough releases in the 6.x branch to change the first number in the version number (at one time, release 6.0 was formed after 5.19). The numbering change is carried out for aesthetic reasons and is a formal step that relieves discomfort due to the accumulation of a large number of releases in the series.
The new version includes 15,624 corrections from 2,477 developers,
patch size – 56 MB (changes affected 18053 files, 704060 lines of code were added,
278132 lines removed). The last release had 15657 fixes from 2237 developers, the patch size was 52 MB. About 51% of all presented in 7.0 changes are related to device drivers, approximately 11% of changes are attitude towards updating code specific to hardware architectures, 14% related to the network stack, 5% to file systems and 3% to internal kernel subsystems.
Main innovations in kernel 7.0 (1, 2, 3):