Linux Kernel: 7.2 Ships With a Wave of Late Fixes
Linux 7.2 officially landed, closing out a release cycle marked by last-minute fixes across scheduling, timers, security, and a reverted i2c change that broke Thinkpad touchpads.
Duration: PT2M30S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Linux Kernel.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Linux Kernel
- Published: 2026-08-17T13:13:30Z
- Audio duration: PT2M30S
Transcript excerpt
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Good day. It's August 17th, 2026, and this is your Linux Kernel briefing.
The headline: Linux 7.2 is out, tagged directly by Linus Torvalds in commit 8d3ae59. Everything else in today's activity is the final cleanup that shaped this release.
The dominant theme is pre-release firefighting. Torvalds pulled a stack of urgent fixes from the tip tree covering timers, scheduling, and core kernel behavior. On ARM systems, a broken virtual timer on the Raspberry Pi 5's SoC now falls back to the physical timer, and a build error affecting ARM's rpc default…
Security and correctness also featured heavily. Perf got two related fixes: exited events can no longer become group leaders, and a use-after-free bug tied to detached sibling events was closed off. Separately, block subsystem maintainers fixed a drbd regression that was leaking shared secrets over netlink — a real…
One notable reversal: Torvalds pulled back a change to the i2c designware driver that deferred probing for child GPIO interrupt controllers. It looked reasonable on paper but broke touchpads on multiple Thinkpad models. Rather than wait for the fix to route through the i2c tree, Torvalds reverted it directly to…
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