Linus Torvalds has released version 7.0 of the Linux kernel.<\/p>\n
As The Register has previously reported<\/a>, kernel boss Linus Torvalds doesn\u2019t think kernel version numbers signify anything important, but he feels that once a release series reaches x.19 it\u2019s worth rolling over to x.0 to avoid confusion.<\/p>\n His Sunday release announcement<\/a> for version 7.0 therefore represents a normal kernel release that just happens to feature a round number.<\/p>\n However, Torvalds\u2019 release announcement features something a little unusual.<\/p>\n \u201cThe last week of the release continued the same \u2018lots of small fixes\u2019 trend, but it all really does seem pretty benign, so I’ve tagged the final 7.0 and pushed it out,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n \u201cI suspect it’s a lot of AI tool use that will keep finding corner cases for us for a while, so this may be the \u2018new normal\u2019 at least for a while. Only time will tell.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s an interesting observation in light of kernel dev 2IC Greg Kroah-Hartman\u2019s observation<\/a> that AI has become a truly useful bug-spotter for the kernel maintenance crew. GKH also last week made a pull request<\/a> that delivered what he described as \u201csome documentation updates to the security-bugs.rst file to hopefully tell the AI tools (and any users that actually read the documentation), how to send us better security bug reports as the quantity of reports these past few weeks has increased dramatically due to tools getting better at \u2018finding\u2019 things.\u201d<\/p>\n Probably the most notable inclusion in this release is the conclusion of experimental work to support Rust \u2013 meaning the language is now officially supported for kernel development.<\/p>\n Version 7.0 of the kernel also includes more work to support ARM, RISC-V and Loongson processors, and more sophisticated support for KVM virtual machines on AMD EPYC 5 CPUs.<\/p>\n Self-healing XFS is another inclusion, making the filesystem more robust.<\/p>\n The kernel watchers at Phoronix spotted<\/a> new code for the venerable SPARC and DEC Alpha CPUs<\/p>\n