Linux 7.2 Ships After Record-Busy Cycle; Fair GPU Scheduler Held Back

Linux 7.2 shipped on its regular cadence after one of the heaviest development cycles the kernel has seen, trailing only 6.7 in volume. Headline additions include cache-aware scheduling, further MGLRU tuning, sub-schedulers for the sched_ext extensible scheduler framework, and automatic creation of multi-size transparent hugepages. The pace reflects what maintainers now treat as the baseline, with recent cycles dominated by a steady stream of fixes.

Igalia’s contributions center on graphics and scheduling. Its DRM scheduler fair policy—which improves GPU sharing when light interactive workloads compete against heavy ones—was ready to become the default but was pulled back to opt-in after a regression surfaced during the 7.2-rc7 week; the fix is already identified, so a return in a later release looks likely. The company also landed runtime power management for Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 GPUs, so the V3D clock now spins down when the GPU is idle rather than staying powered for the driver’s lifetime, and fixed long-standing Pi 3 tile-memory bugs that had been crashing RetroPie users for years.

Other notable work includes better sched_ext crash diagnostics (dumping the CPU that triggered a scheduler ejection first so high-core-count reports aren’t truncated), a fix for a 14-year-old robust-futex data-corruption bug, a race-condition fix in the ueagle-atm USB driver flagged repeatedly by syzbot, hardening of the x86 boot memcmp() inline assembly against compiler reordering, and early amdgpu support for HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link that traces back to years-old AMD work.