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The Linux kernel is about to hit a milestone that has the open-source community genuinely excited. Linus Torvalds officially confirmed that after releasing version 6.19 on February 8, 2026, the next kernel in line will be Linux 7.0, and early benchmarks are already turning heads.
The merge window opened February 9th, with the first release candidate available for public testing on February 22nd, and a full release expected around mid-April 2026.
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is reportedly hoping to ship it as its default kernel, which would put these improvements in the hands of millions of everyday users almost immediately.
A 75% speed jump that actually means something
The headline number making the rounds comes straight from the kernel mailing list: memory reclaim speed, how fast the system frees up cached memory, improved by up to 75% in testing on a 32-core ARM64 server.
On x86 machines, the gain was still over 50%. To put that in context, developers ran a benchmark where 10 GB of file-backed data was loaded into memory and then 8 GB of it was reclaimed. The difference was dramatic.
That’s not the only performance win either. The close_range system call, used to close batches of file descriptors at once, also received what developers described as a “significant improvement,” thanks to an algorithmic optimization that makes it far more efficient when dealing with sparse file descriptor tables.
For containerized workloads, which are basically the standard in modern Linux deployments, the scheduler also got a major upgrade: time slice extensions, a change that’s been in development for nearly a decade, finally made it into the merge window.
Rust goes mainstream, hardware gets a big refresh
Perhaps the most consequential long-term change in Linux 7.0 is that Rust is no longer experimental. The language, which first appeared in the mainline kernel with version 6.1 back in late 2022, has now been officially recognized as a core part of the kernel.
That matters because Rust addresses a class of memory safety bugs in C, things like use-after-free vulnerabilities, that have historically been a major attack surface. More Rust in the kernel means more stability and fewer security holes over time, without a meaningful performance tradeoff.
On the hardware side, Linux 7.0 brings improved support for Intel’s Arrow Lake and deeper AMD Zen 5 and RDNA 4 integration.
Nvidia also gets some improvements, and on the mobile front, the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 gains DP and eDP display support, while the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 picks up PCIe and USB PHY support. Filesystems aren’t left out either: both Btrfs and bcachefs are getting stability and performance work in this cycle.
It’s shaping up to be one of the most well-rounded kernel releases in years, and we’re just getting started with what’s being merged.
Are you excited about what Linux 7.0 is bringing to the table? Drop your thoughts below, especially if you’re already running test builds!