// OMG! UBUNTU! — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Linux 7.2 brings cache-aware scheduling, faster ext4 and Btrfs
Linux kernel 7.2 has been released, adding cache-aware scheduling, ext4 filesystem performance boosts and a slew of new and improved hardware drivers for laptops and peripherals.
A merge widow record was also set during the 9-week development cycle, with more than 2,100 individual contributors involved. AI, obviously, has helped. Commit-crunching by LWN found roughly 5% of commits in 7.2 have an ‘assisted-by’ tag, indicating AI usage.
Not that the latest kernel update was all additions.
More than 13,000 lines of code for legacy i486 CPU emulation were removed from Linux 7.2, as was a 40-year-old Hercules graphics card driver, AppleTalk networking protocol and ISA and PCMCIA ARCnet drivers.
None of that is stuff people will miss on the daily, and those who do can boot Linux 7.1 or lower.
Finally, a key feature expected to arrive in Linux 7.2 – a fair(er) GPU scheduler – didn’t. A last-minute revert switched back to the first-in-first-out (FIFO) method due to reports of performance regressions on certain AMD graphics cards.
For a closer look at more of what’s new in Linux 7.2, read on!
Linux 7.2 makes its task scheduler (which decides what tasks run and when) cache-aware. This means it can recognise when threads (parts of a task) belong to the same process and keep them on cores that share a cache.
Scheduler is now smarter, keeping process threads on a core with a shared cache
Previously the scheduler balanced load across all your CPU’s cores without checking whether threads on separate cores shared memory.