The release and its "new normal"
Linus Torvalds officially released version 7.2 of the Linux kernel on August 17, 2026, capping a development cycle he described as the "new normal" for the project. In his weekly status update, Torvalds wrote that the final week of the release was, "once again, bigger than I would have wished for," a pattern he previously attributed to an increased volume of contributions produced with AI coding tools. "If I delayed releases for that reason we'd probably never have a release at all," he wrote, while noting the release includes several late reverts, including drm scheduling changes, as a way of handling code that "wasn't ready and caused problems."
Hardware support and deprecations
The 7.2 release adds initial support for running Linux on Apple M3 devices, alongside a new Apple Silicon SMC power driver that restores working battery reporting on those machines, addressing a longstanding gap for Asahi Linux and other Apple hardware efforts. On the server side, the kernel enables Intel FRED (Flexible Return Event Delivery) by default on supported processors and introduces a "Cache Aware Scheduling" framework designed to make manycore CPUs such as AMD EPYC 5 and Intel Xeon 6 more efficient by keeping work close to useful cached data. Graphics updates and preparatory work for next-generation chips from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia are also included. The release removes support for several legacy components: AppleTalk, old ISA adapters, PCMCIA cards, the i486 processor, the bus mouse driver, and certain legacy PCI code.
Storage, security, and embedded changes
A new NTFS driver, previously known as NTFSPLUS inside the kernel tree, ships as a replacement for the aging ntfs3 stack, with the project pointing to cleaner handling of Windows partitions from Linux. Real-time scheduling has been extended to 32-bit ARM, opening deterministic workloads to older embedded and IoT hardware, and a new Coreboot framebuffer driver enables a fully libre stack from firmware to desktop. Hardware-accelerated Zstd compression is now available on Intel QAT engines, and AMD Ryzen AI NPUs gain power telemetry. Two security fixes land in 7.2: a local privilege-escalation path in OpenRISC is closed, and a shared-secret leak in the DRBD distributed-replicated-block-device subsystem is patched. The stable release touches more than 441,000 lines of code after seven release candidates.
Scale of the cycle and what comes next
The 7.2 release followed seven release candidates and was developed over a roughly two-month window, during which Torvalds publicly challenged critics who disliked the AI-assisted contribution model to fork the project, an appeal that did not produce a sustained alternative development line. The 7.3 merge window has already begun, and Torvalds has signalled that the cadence of larger-than-expected final weeks is likely to persist as contributors continue to lean on AI coding tools. Users on 7.1 builds can move directly to 7.2 via the source tarball and patch file now available on the kernel archive.
Other developments
Separately, the 7.2 release notes include support for an unusual gaming peripheral, the "Zenaim Leverless," described as a slab-style button controller popular with e-sports players, which now works with Linux.
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