Linux 7.0 Kernel Confirmed By Linus Torvalds, Expected In Mid-April 2026
4 75An anonymous reader writes: Linus Torvalds has confirmed the next major kernel series as Linux 7.0, reports Linux news website 9to5Linux.com: "So there you have it, the Linux 6.x era has ended with today's Linux 6.19 kernel release, and a new one will begin with Linux 7.0, which is expected in mid-April 2026. The merge window for Linux 7.0 will open tomorrow, February 9th, and the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone is expected on February 22nd, 2026."
4 comments
Re:Rust? (Score: 5, Informative)
by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @06:56PM (#65978920)
It's just a numbering scheme. Linus thinks .19 is already big enough number to increment the major release number, even without any new feature introduction. So 6.19 is the last 6.x version, as had happened with 3.19, 4.20, 5.19.
Running out of fingers and toes (Score: 5, Informative)
by felixrising ( 1135205 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @06:12PM (#65978842)
FWIW, Linux 7.0’s major version increase is primarily a numbering milestone, not a signal of a single massive breaking change or new feature set. Linux kernel version numbers are sequential and historically don’t imply strict semantic meaning; number bumps have happened for pragmatic reasons (cleaner versioning and manageable minor numbers) rather than functional messaging. El Reg has more [theregister.com]
Re:Running out of fingers and toes (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) on <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Monday February 09, 2026 @06:48PM (#65978902)
Another popular way is date based numbering. So the kernel just released could have been 2026.02, the next prolly 2026.05, the last 2025.11. It doesn't really matter.
Re: Damn I'm getting old (Score: 5, Informative)
by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @07:39PM (#65978982)
Pick up the loadable module part and then I think Character devices are essentially the same. Network and block devices are a little more involved. Cgroups, name spaces, I/O memory allocators, device tree. Those things are new and need a little work to learn them if you need to support them.