{
  "id": 2374568,
  "title": "Linux 7.2",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/20/linux-7-2",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-08-20T15:46:18.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Hacker News Best",
    "slug": "hacker-news-best",
    "url": "https://www.igalia.com/2026/08/19/Linux-72-Released.html"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "The Linux 7.2 kernel was tagged and released this week, following the regular schedule. This particular cycle was one of the most productive, with the last three or four cycles being notably busy, particularly concerning issue fixes. This release introduced several noteworthy advancements, such as cache-aware scheduling, enhancements to MGLRU, the introduction of sub-schedulers for sched_ext, and the automatic creation of multi-size transparent hugepages. For a comprehensive overview of these updates, readers can consult the LWN articles (part 1 and part 2).\n\nIgalia made a significant impact with contributions, including the DRM scheduler fair policy. This policy aimed to bring substantial improvements in situations where multiple clients share the GPU or when a lightweight interactive client competes with a more resource-intensive one. However, due to a last-minute regression reported during the 7.2-rc7 week, the default policy has been temporarily restored to the old first-in/first-out (FIFO) scheduler. The developers are optimistic that the regression fix will be re-enabled in a subsequent kernel release. Additionally, sched-ext observability was enhanced to facilitate debugging. When a custom sched-ext scheduler encounters a runtime error, such as failing to schedule a task for over 30 seconds, the kernel will eject the problematic scheduler and revert to the default one. To aid in diagnosing these failures, the kernel now dumps the status of each CPU, with the exit CPU (the one that triggered the error) prioritized and its ID directly provided to BPF schedulers and user-space tools.\n\nA notable addition in this release is the support for Runtime Power Management (RPM) on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 GPUs. Previously, the V3D driver operated with a simplistic power model, keeping the GPU clock enabled throughout its lifetime. With RPM, the GPU is powered only when actively processing work, and its clock can be disabled while idling. This change reduces power consumption when the Raspberry Pi is not utilizing the GPU. The developers have provided a blog post detailing this feature, along with power measurements. Furthermore, two long-standing bugs in the Raspberry Pi 3 GPU driver were fixed, which had plagued RetroPie users for years, causing random GPU hangs and complete system crashes. These issues were linked to the kernel's handling of tile memory when the GPU ran out of space while processing a frame. The fixes ensure that each graphics job writes exclusively to its dedicated memory area, and reused memory is thoroughly cleared before reuse, thereby preventing stale or corrupted data from reaching the GPU. This improvement should eliminate the crashes experienced by RetroPie users while navigating menus.\n\nThe release also addressed several GPU reset issues on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, enhancing the reliability and consistency of the reset process. Moreover, several fixes were introduced for GPU resets on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, improving the overall reliability of the reset procedure. The developers continued to work on enhancing and maintaining the futex() system call, which is crucial for various workloads to create synchronization mechanisms. In this cycle, they contributed to designing and implementing a solution for a 14-year-old bug that had caused data corruption in the robust list mechanism under certain edge cases. Additionally, a longstanding issue in the ueagle-atm driver, which could trigger a race condition between kernfs create and remove operations during device probe and disconnect via the request_firmware API, was resolved. Lastly, improvements were made to the inline-assembly implementation of memcmp() used during x86 boot, preventing potential bugs due to compiler optimization and instruction reordering.",
  "summary": "Article URL: https://www.igalia.com/2026/08/19/Linux-72-Released.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49376265 Points: 263 # Comments: 106",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}