The final release of the Linux 7.0 kernel series is expected in mid April 2026.
Linus Torvalds announced today the general availability for public testing of the first Release Candidate (RC) development milestone of the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel series.
Today marks two weeks since the release of Linux kernel 6.19 and the opening of the merge window for Linux kernel 7.0, which means that it is time to test drive the Release Candidate (RC) versions during the next couple of months, the first one being available for download right now from Linus Torvalds’s Git tree.
Like every other major kernel branch before it, Linux 7.0 is a big release in terms of version change, not features. However, one important change is that Rust support is now finally stable, no longer under an “experimental” umbrella, and, as expected, there are even a number of Rust updates this cycle.
“We have a new major number purely because I’m easily confused and not good with big numbers,” said Linus Torvalds. “We haven’t done releases based on features (or on “stable vs unstable”) for a long, long time now. So that new major number does *not* mean that we have some big new exciting feature, or that we’re somehow leaving old interfaces behind. It’s the usual “solid progress” marker, nothing more.”
Apart from the Rust changes, Linux kernel 7.0 promises new features like support for atomic 64-byte loads on ARM processors, support for non-circular SQ entries that help to keep SQEs hot in cache, and direct I/O support for the Btrfs file system when using a block size larger than the page size.
The Btrfs file system also received initial support for the remap-tree feature, a translation layer of logical block addresses that allows changes without moving or rewriting blocks, enabling relocation or other changes that require COW (Copy-on-Write). However, this feature is considered experimental, for now.
Linux 7.0 also promises autonomous self-healing support for the XFS file system, support for SPI controllers and peripherals that have multiple SPI data lanes, support for BPF token access control to SELinux, support for ML-DSA post-quantum signatures, and LZMA compression for the EROFS file system by default.
The final release of Linux kernel 7.0 is expected in mid-April 2026, depending on how many Release Candidate (RC) milestones are released until then. Therefore, we can expect Linux 7.0 to land on April 12th if there are only seven Release Candidates or on April 19th if eight Release Candidates are published.
Source: https://9to5linux.com/linus-torvalds-announces-first-linux-kernel-7-0-release-candidate