In working toward releasing the stable Linux 7.2 kernel in less than one month's time, out today is Linux 7.2-rc5 to ship this week's latest bug/regression fixes and help facilitate more testing of this in-development kernel version.

Linux 7.2-rc5 brings a variety of bug fixes, many of which continue to turn up via AI/LLM agents. Linux 7.2-rc5 brings the "new normal" of audio fixes across the board, driven on by many AI-powered discoveries and lots of quirky hardware out there. Linux 7.2-rc5 also fixes an issue in the IEEE-1394 Firewire IPv4 networking that has existed in the mainline Linux kernel since 2009.

Linus Torvalds wrote in today's 7.2-rc5 announcement:

"It's Sunday afternoon, and once more we have quite a massive -rc5.

The same thing happened in 7.1, so part of it is just the "new normal". But I think this time the bigger part of it is that the networking tree ended up having some pent up work from the previous week due to conference distractions. So over a third of the patch is networking, although the bulk of that is obviously on the driver side.

There are all the usual other drivers in here too, although for a change there are more USB changes than GPU drivers. So that's something. But there's a little bit of everything on the driver side (sound, tty, block, firewire - you get the idea).

And then there's everything else: tooling (selftest and perf), fielsystems (smb, btrfs), rust and arch fixes, documentation...

So it's a bit too big for my liking, but nothing in there strikes me as particularly strange or scary."

There are many new features and changes with Linux 7.2 that will ideally debut as stable in three weeks on 16 August.