Linux 7.0 released with XFS self healing, agent-agnostic AI keys & major hardware support

Linux 7.0 is now available after a final week of mostly minor fixes, as noted by Linus Torvalds. It brings plenty of updates, although it is not a long term support release, so Linux 6.18 remains the LTS branch and will be supported through December 2028. Two of the broader changes in 7.0 are that Rust support is now officially no longer experimental, and the swap subsystem gets another round of performance work, improving readback under memory pressure and zram writeback behavior.

Storage is one of the strongest parts of this release. Linux 7.0 adds a generic filesystem error reporting framework so metadata corruption and file I/O problems can be surfaced to userspace more consistently. XFS then builds on that with autonomous self healing through the new xfs_healer daemon, which can react to errors while the filesystem stays mounted. Btrfs adds direct I/O for blocks larger than the kernel page size plus an experimental remap tree for logical relocations without rewriting physical data, and EXT4 improves concurrent direct I/O write performance.

Linux 7.0 also adds three new keyboard actions for AI workflows: Action on Selection for running AI tasks on highlighted text or images, Contextual Insertion for dropping generated or retrieved content into the active field, and Contextual Query for context aware suggestions. Torvalds also noted that AI tools may be helping uncover more corner cases during development, which he suggested could become part of the new normal. Beyond that, hardware support expands with broader Intel Nova Lake audio support, richer Intel Arc telemetry, more Panther Lake firmware support, early AMD Zen 6 metrics, and mainline H.264 and H.265 decoding for Rockchip RK3576 and RK3588 boards.