Linus Torvalds confirms Linux 7.0 is on track for final release next week

Despite larger patches possibly caused by AI coding tools and holiday delays, Linux 7.0 RC7 shows no major issues before its stable debut.

Despite ups and downs over the course of the Linux 7.0 development cycle, founder Linus Torvalds has confirmed that the seventh release candidate (RC7) contained no big surprises this week, meaning we are on course for the final release next week. There were concerns during earlier phases of the cycle because they were coming in larger than normal, and that can spell trouble in the form of delays.

In his announcement on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), Torvalds said that while there were no big surprises this week, RC7 did continue the trend of being somewhat larger than usual, but noted that nothing really stands out or looks worrisome.

It is suspected that this series has seen a larger number of patches because of the disruption over Christmas which could have caused new features to be committed with Linux 7.0 rather than Linux 6.19. It was also suggested last week by Torvalds that the larger patches could be to do with the use of AI coding tools.

This week, half of the patch was made up by drivers for GPU, Networking, USB, and Sound; all of which looked “very normal.” The rest of the patch was made up by Core Networking, Kernel fixes, Filesystems, Selftests, Arch fixes, documentation, and Cryptography. All these looked normal too.

Torvalds topped off the post by saying the stable release will be out by next week, but asked testers to keep testing.

Once Linux 7.0 is released, it will be up to distribution maintainers to roll it out to their users. Cutting edge distros such as Fedora and Arch will deliver it to users relatively quickly, but Debian and Ubuntu-based distributions shouldn’t expect it until their next major operating system release.

Unlike Windows which delivers individual drivers for your hardware, Linux bakes hardware support into the kernel. Each new kernel release brings with it support for newer hardware, so if you’ve tried Linux and one of your components didn’t work as expected, it could do after this update.

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Posted Monday 6 April 2026 at 6:16 pm AEST (my time).

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