The Wire · Showcase
LINUS PULLS RISC-V MEMORY FIX AND VFS SAFETY PATCH INTO 7.2-RC6
By RepoJournal · Filed · About Linux
The kernel hit three critical fixes overnight across RISC-V, VFS, and s390 as 7.2-RC6 tightens before final release.
Linus merged a RISC-V fix [1] that addresses swiotlb initialization on systems with DRAM above 4GiB, a direct blocker for hardware like Tenstorrent Blackhole cards, plus an out-of-bounds access in memory hot-remove code on Sv39 and Sv48 systems. The VFS merge [2] hardens binfmt_misc to prevent 'F' entries from pinning their own instances, closing a subsystem lifecycle bug that could leave interpreters open until unmount. s390 pulled in three separate security fixes [3]: a PCI MMIO write syscall that was falsely reporting success, buffer overflows in zcrypt CCA cipher operations, and length validation issues in pkey token handling. x86 got a CPU classification fix [4] moving Zen5 models out of the Zen6 range where they were miscategorized, and corrected boot-time memcmp() asm constraints. The scheduler merge [5] fixed a deferred wakeup rule that was running when it should have been deferred, a subtle timing issue in the deadline class. All told, 10 commits across hotspot subsystems in a rapid-fire RC cycle.
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Action items
- → Test RISC-V swiotlb initialization if you run high-memory systems torvalds/linux [monitor]
- → Stage 7.2-RC6 in your test matrix; final release is imminent torvalds/linux [plan]
- → Flag this RC cycle internally if you maintain architecture-specific code torvalds/linux [monitor]
References
- [1] Merge tag 'riscv-for-linus-7.2-rc6' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/riscv/linux torvalds/linux
- [2] Merge tag 'vfs-7.2-rc6.fixes' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/vfs/vfs torvalds/linux
- [3] Merge tag 's390-7.2-6' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/s390/linux torvalds/linux
- [4] Merge tag 'x86-urgent-2026-08-02' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip torvalds/linux
- [5] Merge tag 'sched-urgent-2026-08-02' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip torvalds/linux