Linux 7.0-rc3 Released: "Some Of The Biggest In Recent History"

Linux 7.0-rc3 has been released, and Linus Torvalds notes it is unusually large for this stage of the release cycle, calling it 'some of the biggest in recent history' — even bigger than rc2. Key changes include a fix for a severe slab performance regression, new hardware support for Dell/ASUS/OneXPlayer/Lenovo devices, a ~1.5% network performance improvement on AMD Zen 2 CPUs via scoped user access, Apple Magic Trackpad 2 battery reporting fix, IBPB-On-Entry security for AMD SEV-SNP guest VMs, and Sub-NUMA Clustering topology fixes for newer Intel CPUs. Torvalds attributes the size partly to a large number of selftests and trivial commits, and speculates the extra rc8 in the 6.19 cycle may be a factor. Linux 7.0 is expected to ship as the default kernel in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora 44, with Ubuntu prepared to ship it even if the stable release misses the kernel freeze deadline.