Linux kernel 7.0 is now available for download, as announced today by Linus Torvalds himself, featuring enhanced hardware support, filesystem and networking improvements, security enhancements, and many other changes.
“I 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 “new normal” at least for a while. Only time will tell. – Linus Torvalds”
While not a major release in terms of new features, despite the major version number change, Linux kernel 7.0 finally promotes Rust support to stable. The “Rust experiment” has been concluded at the 2025 Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit, and Rust is here to stay.
Some interesting new features in Linux 7.0 include support for atomic 64-byte loads and stores instructions on ARM64 CPUs, support for RISC-V Zicfiss and Zicfilp extensions on RISC-V CPUs, and 128-bit atomic cmpxchg support on the LoongArch architecture.
The Btrfs file system received support for direct I/O when a block size is bigger than the page size and initial support for the remap-tree feature, the XFS file system received autonomous self-healing support, and there’s a new immutable root file system called “nullfs”.
LZMA compression has been enabled by default for the EROFS file system, a time-slice extension mechanism has been added to the rseq(2) system call, there’s a new API for file I/O error reporting to filesystems, and filesystems are now required to explicitly opt-in on lease support.
Among other changes, Linux 7.0 enables support for non-circular io_uring queues for better cache performance in applications, improves the performance of BTF type lookups with binary search, adds support for cBPF filters for io_uring, and adds support for implicit arguments to BPF kernel functions.
Linux kernel 7.0 also improves the swapping performance, adds support for Clang static analysis, introduces compressed data writeback to the zram subsystem, adds support for large folios to the F2FS file system, improves the NTFS3 file system and the NFSD daemon, and adds support for the NFS 4.1 protocol by default.
On top of that, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) can now virtualize and advertise support for ERAPS (Enhanced Return Address Predictor Security) on AMD CPUs (Zen5 or later) that support this feature, and there are new x2APIC features to control support for Suppress EOI Broadcasts on KVM.
Security-wise, Linux 7.0 updates SELinux with support for BPF token access control, adds support for verifying ML-DSA (Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm) post-quantum signatures, and updates NETFILTER_PKT records to show both source and destination addresses.
Linux 7.0 also brings a new build-time configuration option for replacing the default Tux boot logo with an image of their own, support for AccECN congestion-notification protocol, support for network namespaces on VSOCK sockets, and an initial implementation on Wi-Fi 8/UHR (Ultra High Reliability) 802.11bn support.
Of course, there are also new and updated drivers to support more hardware, including Google Tensor SoC USB PHYs, Apple Type-C PHYs, Mediatek Dimensity 6300 and 9200 DMA controllers, Qualcomm Kaanapali (a.k.a. Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2), and Dell OptiPlex 7080 computers.
Moreover, Linux 7.0 adds support for SPI controllers and peripherals that have multiple SPI data lanes, and adds a new OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE option to open_tree(), which can be used by container runtimes to open a new mount namespace without cloning an existing mount namespace.
Also worth mentioning is that starting with Linux 7.0, there’s now an official policy on tool-generated content to guide contributors on how to best use kernel development tools, new and old, along with documentation specifically aimed at AI coding assistants.
“In the last few years, the capabilities of coding tools have exploded. As those capabilities have expanded, contributors and maintainers have more and more questions about how and when to apply those capabilities. […] This new document just reiterates existing best practices for development tooling.”
You can download Linux kernel 7.0 right now directly from Linus Torvald’s git tree or from the kernel.org website if you want to compile it on your GNU/Linux distribution. However, I recommend waiting for the new Linux release to land in your distro’s stable software repositories before updating your kernel.
Now that Linux kernel 7.0 is out, the merge window will soon open for the next major kernel series, Linux 7.1, which is expected in mid-June 2026. Until then, the first Linux 7.1 Release Candidate (RC) will be available for public testing in two weeks, on April 26th, 2026.
waiting for release