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Linux 7.0 launches with enablement for Intel Nova Lake, AMD Zen 6 — major kernel update expected in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora 44 first
Linux 7.0-rc1 has been officially released and brings with it a boatload of new features and changes. Phoronix reports that the new kernel is focused on preparing for upcoming AMD and Intel hardware, including Nova Lake and Zen 6. Since this kernel is bleeding edge, don't expect every distro to adopt it immediately, however it is expected that the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora 44 will be some of the first Linux distros to upgrade to Linux 7.0.
Beyond these major updates, the changelog for Linux kernel 7.0 is massive. On the CPU side alone, enablement work has been done to get Nova Lake, Diamond Rapids, and Zen 6 chips operational on Linux 7.0. Intel TSX is now tuned to auto mode to boost performance on newer Intel CPUs. DSA 3.0 accelerators are now included in Linux 7.0 to offload appropriate tasks to dedicated silicon on newer Xeon chips. Turbostat — a command-line hardware monitoring tool — now reports L2 cache stats for newer Intel CPUs. NTB driver support and performance events support have been added for Diamond Rapids Xeon CPUs. LPSS driver and sound support have been added for Nova Lake chips.
Zen 6 performance events and metrics support has been added to the kernel, and new support for address translation in Zen 5 has been added to the CLX subsystem. Beyond Intel and AMD CPUs, support for features for CPUs and SoCs from other brands has been added as well. Atomic LS64/LS64V instructions have been added for ARM64 CPUs, user-space CFI support has been added for RISC-V CPUs, and mainline support for the SpacemiT K3 RVA 23 SoC has been added.
Graphics received fewer updates, but there are a few noteworthy additions. Support for future AMD graphics hardware has been added, and Nova Lake display support has been added (for the iGPU). Most of the other changes surround bug fixes and display optimizations.
Beyond pure CPU and GPU hardware, there have been a number of other improvements, such as Apple USB Type-C PHY support, and file system enhancements and improvements for F2FS, exFAT, and EXT4 to name a few. If you want to know more, we have covered more of Linux 7.0 features in previous content.
