{"id":50944,"date":"2026-04-13T13:01:42","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T13:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ubuntuhandbook.org\/?p=50944"},"modified":"2026-04-13T13:01:42","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T13:01:42","slug":"linux-7-0-released-default-ubuntu-26-04","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ubuntuhandbook.org\/index.php\/2026\/04\/linux-7-0-released-default-ubuntu-26-04\/","title":{"rendered":"Linux 7.0 Released to Be Default Kernel in Ubuntu 26.04 & Fedora 44"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Linux Kernel 7.0 was released! Linus Torvalds announced<\/a> it on Sunday afternoon:<\/p>\n

The last week of the release continued the same “lots of small fixes” trend, but it all really does seem pretty benign, so I’ve tagged the final 7.0 and pushed it out.<\/i><\/p>\n

I suspect it’s a lot of AI tool use that will keep finding corner cases for us for a while, so this may be the “new normal” at least for a while. Only time will tell.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Ubuntu 26.04 default to Kernel 7.0<\/p><\/div>\n

The new kernel introduced many new features! For Intel, the TSX mode now defaults to “auto” rather than being off for capable hardware, e.g., Xeon series processors, improving the performance of multi-threaded software.<\/p>\n

It added DSA 3.0 accelerators for high performance data copy and analytics acceleration with software adapted to make use of the engine on recent Xeon CPUs.<\/p>\n

For the upcoming Xeon 7 (Diamond Rapids) processors, the new kernel added perf<\/code> performance analysis support, and NTB driver support for two or more servers to communicate directly over PCIe.<\/p>\n

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The Kernel also added Nova Lake sound support, Nova Lake S support for Intel LPSS driver, thermal control for Intel Panther Lake, Wildcat Lake, and Nova Lake processors, as well as L2 cache stats report for recent Intel CPUs via Turbostat command line tool.<\/p>\n

It as well added “Slow” workload hints support for Intel Panther Lake, allowing to handle background or long-running tasks more efficiently.<\/p>\n

On the GPU side, it added multi-device Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support for Intel Xe graphics driver, multi-queue execution mode support for Intel Crescent Island GPU, Nova Lake graphics support, as well as more Intel GPU temperature sensors with xe driver.<\/p>\n

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image from Intel.com<\/p><\/div>\n

For AMD, it added AMD Zen 6 events and metrics support in the perf<\/code> tool, and Compute Express Link (CXL) support for Zen 5 address translation feature.<\/p>\n

It also updated AMDKFD compute driver and AMDGPU graphics driver for GC 12.1, GC 11.5.4, SDMA 7.1, SDMA 6.1.4 support, as well as AMDGPU support for SMUIO 15.x, PSP 15.x, IH 7.1, IH 6.1.1, MMHUB 3.4, MMHUB 4.2.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Valve’s open-source Linux graphics team, Linux Kernel 7.0 also improved support for the old AMD GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs, e.g., Radeon HD 7000, HD 8000 series.<\/p>\n

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image by rwindr from pixabay.com<\/p><\/div>\n

Besides the Intel and AMD updates, this kernel also features SMT hot-plug support, 128-bit atomic cmpxchg support and MEMFD_SECRET system call for LoongArch processors, user-space control-flow integrity (CFI) support for RISC-V, and 64-byte single-copy atomic instructions (LS64\/LS64V) support for ARM64 processors.<\/p>\n

Linux Kernel 7.0 also improved EXT4 filesytem writing performance when dealing with concurrent direct I\/O writes to multiple files, and added new attribute to control the error report timer. It introduced large folio support for F2FS to enhance read speeds for immutable files, and implemented tracepoints to diagnose and resolve lock priority inversion. As well, it added octal DTR “8D-8D-8D” support in SPI NAND for better performance.<\/p>\n

Other changes include:<\/p>\n