Linux 7.2 speeds up the core subsystems but closes the doors on the past

The main thing about Linux 7.2 is not a new feature every user will notice but a reallocation of the kernel's priorities. The developers are speeding up existing subsystems and simplifying code, even if that means saying a final goodbye to very old hardware and protocols.

The release brings the USB4STREAM data streaming mechanism along with performance optimisations for btrfs, xfs and ext4. Unnamed pipes have been sped up and memory consumption in the swap subsystem reduced. These are changes with no spectacular demo, yet they are precisely the ones that can affect a system's responsiveness and how servers behave under load.

A separate layer concerns flexibility and modern hardware. Linux 7.2 allows nested SCHED_EXT schedulers to be created, and KVM has gained support for the Intel MBEC and AMD GMET extensions. The AMDGPU driver has initial support for HDMI 2.1 FRL — for now this is precisely an initial implementation, not a promise of full compatibility with every scenario.

The price of such housekeeping is incompatibility with the past. Support for the i486 CPU has been removed from the kernel, and the AppleTalk protocol dropped entirely. For an ordinary modern computer that probably changes nothing, but for old systems and specialised infrastructure the update requires checking in advance. The original announcement also gives no benchmark results and no detail on how noticeable the claimed speed-ups are.

Linux 7.2 looks less like a release built around a showcase feature and more like a step towards a leaner, more modern kernel: are you ready to give up support for old hardware that still works for the sake of that? Source: OpenNews.opennet.ru: General news feed