AI-enriched Linux 7.2 delivers cache-aware scheduling - here's everything new

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Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux kernel 7.2 over the weekend. He wrote, "This last week of the release was -- once again -- bigger than I would have wished for, but hey, with the whole 'new normal' thing, if I delayed releases for that reason, we'd probably never have a release at all."

"New normal," you ask? He explained this earlier in his note about Linux 7.2's seventh release candidate. "I can't say that I'm exactly thrilled about the size of this all. But it is what it is: the new normal with a lot of fixes, many of them due to review by various AI tools. "

These changes -- which are largely not new features written by AI, but patches to AI-discovered security vulnerabilities --add up.

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Before the release of the 7.1 Linux kernel, Torvalds had said, "The continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable , with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools. People spend all their time just forwarding things to the right people or saying 'that was already fixed a week/month ago.'"

"This is all entirely pointless churn, and we're making it clear that AI-detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved - and only makes that duplication worse because the reporters can't even see each other's reports."

That's not to say Torvalds is against using AI. Torvalds has noted that " AI tools are great , but only if they actually help, rather than cause unnecessary pain and pointless make-believe work. Feel free to use them, but use them in a way that is productive and makes for a better experience."

Unless you live on Linux's bleeding edge, you're unlikely to see these features until the release of fall Linux distros, such as Ubuntu 26.10 . Even then, most of the updates will show their best advantage on computers with complex CPU-cache layouts, newer graphics and mobile hardware, and storage-intensive workloads.

The marquee addition is Cache Aware Scheduling , a new cache scheduling program that's been in the works for several years. Torvalds again: "The goal of the patch series is to aggregate tasks sharing data to the same LLC cache domain, thereby reducing cache bouncing and cache misses, and improving data access efficiency."

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