Linux Kernel 7.0 Released: Rust Goes Permanent (April 2026)

Linus Torvalds on April 12, 2026 released Linux kernel 7.0, officially retiring the experimental label on Rust support, shipping a self-healing XFS filesystem, and delivering up to a 20% throughput improvement on shared-memory swap workloads. The version jump from 6.19 to 7.0 is cosmetic — Torvalds joked he was "almost running out of fingers and toes again" — but the release itself lands several years-in-the-making changes and will ship as the default kernel in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.

What Happened

Torvalds cut the 7.0 release on schedule after a seven-week merge window, breaking the long-running 6.x series at 6.19 — not because of breaking changes (there are none, per the kernel's backward-compatibility policy) but because he finds large minor-version numbers confusing. The version jump had been publicly confirmed in February 2026 and was the first major-number rollover since Linux 6.0 in October 2022.

The headline change is Rust. After six years of incremental integration beginning with Rust-for-Linux in 2020, the kernel now treats Rust as a permanent, first-class language for driver development. Reporting on the release, Phoronix confirmed "Rust support is now permanent and no longer experimental," a milestone that unblocks downstream distros from gating Rust modules behind experimental flags.

Torvalds also used the release announcement to comment on a development-cycle trend: "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." His second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman separately issued updated documentation guidelines calling for higher-quality security bug reports, citing a dramatic increase in AI-assisted bug submissions during the 7.0 cycle.

Key Details

• Rust becomes permanent — Six years after the Rust-for-Linux project began, Rust is officially supported as a language for kernel development. Distros can drop their experimental guards.
• Self-healing XFS — XFS gains an online repair and error-recovery path, backed by a new standardized filesystem error reporting system. Phoronix highlighted this as one of 7.0's most consequential filesystem changes in years.
• Swap throughput up ~20% — Phase II of the swap-table rework delivers "up to 20% better throughput in workloads where multiple processes share the same swapped-out memory," per OMG! Ubuntu's analysis. Desktop gains are more modest.
• Intel TSX re-enabled on modern chips — Transactional Synchronization Extensions, disabled since the 2019 TAA vulnerability, are now auto-enabled on Intel 10th-gen and newer CPUs via a dynamic "auto" setting that keeps TSX off on vulnerable silicon.
• Post-quantum module signing — ML-DSA post-quantum signatures are now supported for kernel module authentication, while legacy SHA-1-based signing has been removed.
• KVM on AMD EPYC 5 — Improved support for KVM virtual machines running on AMD's latest EPYC 5 CPUs, alongside broader ARM, RISC-V, and Loongson processor work.
• Time Slice Extension — A new scheduler feature using Restartable Sequences gives threads more time to finish before preemption.
• Hardware oddity of the release — Support for Bluetooth Rock Band 4 guitar controllers designed for PS4/PS5, enabling the rhythm game on Linux.

What Developers Are Saying

The community's reaction on Slashdot and the kernel mailing list has been measured — the version jump is widely understood as a cosmetic renaming, and attention has shifted to the technical content. One top-voted Slashdot comment summarized the consensus: "No more dumb than any other versioning scheme. I'd rather see a version 7.0 than a version 6.25.3."

The AI-tooling narrative has been more contested. Phoronix and The Register both highlighted Torvalds' quote about AI tools finding corner cases, and downstream kernel developers have pushed back on the signal-to-noise ratio of AI-generated bug reports — which is precisely what prompted Kroah-Hartman to tighten submission guidelines mid-cycle. Rust adoption, by contrast, is drawing near-unanimous approval from driver maintainers who've been shipping Rust code behind experimental flags for years.

What This Means for Developers

Distro adoption: Ubuntu 26.04 LTS will ship with Linux 7.0 as its default kernel. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS users will receive 7.0 as a hardware-enablement (HWE) backport in July 2026 — and, critically, that will be the final new kernel version delivered to 24.04's HWE stack. Fedora and Arch users have 7.0 available from day one through standard repositories.

Driver authors: If you've been holding Rust driver work behind experimental feature flags, those gates can now come down. Expect downstream distributions to begin shipping Rust-written kernel modules as first-class citizens by Q3 2026.

Sysadmins and hosting providers: The swap rework delivers measurable gains for containerized workloads where many processes share memory — worth benchmarking on kernel upgrade. The Intel TSX re-enablement may reintroduce latency-sensitive behavior on modern Xeon fleets; audit before rolling out to production.

Security teams: SHA-1-based module signing is removed. Any internal tooling that signs custom kernel modules will need to move to ML-DSA or other supported schemes before upgrading production fleets.

What's Next

The 7.1 merge window opens immediately and will run through late May 2026, with 7.1 itself expected by early July on the kernel's usual ~10-week cadence. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS launches later in April with 7.0 preinstalled, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.x backports are expected to begin selectively landing 7.0 features later in the year. Rust driver work — already the largest contributor to the 7.0 diff — is expected to expand significantly now that the experimental label is gone.

Sources

• Phoronix — Linux 7.0 Released With New Hardware Support, Optimizations & Self-Healing XFS — Primary technical rundown of the release.
• The Register — Linux 7.0 debuts as Linus Torvalds ponders AI's impact — Torvalds quotes and AI-tooling context.
• OMG! Ubuntu — Linux 7.0: faster swap, Intel TSX & Rock Band 4 guitar support — Feature breakdown and distro adoption timeline.
• 9to5Linux — Linux 7.0 Kernel Confirmed by Linus Torvalds — Pre-release confirmation and version-jump background.
• Slashdot — Linux 7.0 Released — Developer discussion and community reaction.
• Neowin — Linux 7.0 Arrives as Linus Torvalds Embraces a New Era of AI-Driven Kernel Development — Additional reporting and cross-reference.