Linux 7.0 Released, Founder Says Increasing Number of Kernel Bugs Found by AI Tools

According to 1M AI News monitoring, Linux founder Linus Torvalds has released the stable version of the Linux kernel 7.0. The version number jumped from 6.x to 7.0 not due to any major changes, but as part of Torvalds' convention: the major version number advances after x.19 to avoid number confusion.

In the release email, Torvalds wrote that the final week continued the trend of "a lot of small fixes," suspecting a connection to the use of AI tools: "I suspect it's going to continue to help us find the boundary conditions with lots of AI tools in use, and this might be the 'new normal' for some time at least." This aligns with recent observations from the kernel's second-in-command, Greg Kroah-Hartman. GKH submitted a pull request last week updating the security vulnerability reporting documentation aimed at "teaching the AI tools (and those who actually read the docs) how to give us better security vulnerability reports because the number of reports has skyrocketed over the past few weeks as the tooling has gotten better."

The main new features of 7.0 include the formal end of the experimental stage for Rust language support, self-healing capability added to the XFS file system, increased support for more Intel Nova Lake and AMD GPU IP modules, default switching of Intel TSX to automatic mode, and further support for ARM, RISC-V, and Loongson processors. The upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS will be based on this kernel. The 7.1 merge window will open the following day, with Torvalds mentioning that several dozen pull requests are already queued.