Linus Torvalds just released the second weekly release candidate of Linux 7.4 with some notable bug fixes and other changes routed in past the merge window. It’s another big one in the AI era.

This week brought some adjustments to the AMD PerfOpt feature for helping Radeon iGPU performance, fixing faulty BHI mitigation selection for some kernel configurations, a big improvement for FAT32 especially with synchronous mounts, AMDGPU driver fixes for HDMI 2.2 FRL, and numerous fixes for “nasty long standing bugs” in the core memory management code. Plus the usual assortment of bug fixes as well as the seemingly never-ending flow of AI/LLM generated patches and bug reports.

Linux 7.4-rc2 Git tag

Linux creator Linus Torvalds wrote in the 7.4-rc2 announcement:

"Ok, a big -rc2 to go with the largest ever -rc1. But the diffstat looks fairly benign, and is dominated by some automated coccinelle updates that I got for the merge window but left for rc2 because I didn't want to deal with them when I was on the road (and had a hard time finding the motivation to deal with them afterwards too, to be honest).

That said, the scripted updates are largely just one- and two-liners, and they [really] are very straightforward so they "dominate" the diffstat only in the sense that they are very spread out and do add a lot of noise.

When masking that noise out from the diffstat, the shape of it changes - not spread out over thousands of files any more. But it does not look unusual: a third is drivers (gpu, networking and sound account for most of it, but there's a bit of everything), another third is networking and bpf, and the final third is "the rest" (mostly filesystems, mm, arch updates).

And yes, much of this was driven by various AI fixes. I think I'll stop repeating that, and we can just take it for granted. But this time around Alexei claims that on the bpf side at least the fixes are now coming in faster than the new reports, and that sounds lovely if true.

I think most other areas haven't reached that point yet, but it's at least a sign that we _may_ be starting to see the tide starting to turn.

Don't hold your breath, but maybe cross your fingers we'll be getting there in the not entirely distant future.

In the meantime, please keep testing,"

See our Linux 7.4 feature overview for a look at all the changes coming to this kernel aiming for a stable release around the end of December.