Deborah Brouwer
August 18, 2026
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Linux kernel 7.2 has been released, bringing another broad collection of architecture, memory-management, filesystem, security, and hardware-support improvements. For Rust watchers, the momentum continues in v7.2 with the import of the zerocopy crate into kernel source code; the introduction of the GPUVM abstraction for Rust GPU drivers; s390 architecture wiring into the Rust build system; and the driver-core infrastructure introducing compile-time lifetime checks between drivers and their device resources.
In the core kernel, the CPU scheduler now has cache-aware load balancing, while the slab allocator received additional protection against buffer-overflow attacks using Clang allocation tokens. To see a summary of these and many other interesting improvements from the v7.2 release, see LWN’s summaries:
Collabora engineers authored 102 patches included in this cycle. Their work spans graphics, media, Rust, virtualization, networking, power management, and SoC enablement.
Collabora continued to add features and support for Rockchip’s RK3588 platform in Linux 7.2.
Michael Riesch added initial support for the RK3588 Video Capture (VICAP) unit to the RKCIF driver. VICAP is an essential part of the RK3588 camera interface providing one DVP, six MIPI CSI-2 receivers, scale/crop units, and a data path multiplexer. With RK3588 VICAP support, raw sensor images can now be streamed using the upstream media stack. The work was tested on a Radxa ROCK 5B+ with two Radxa 4K cameras attached. This series provides the foundation for future integration with the RK3588 image signal processor (ISP).
Benjamin Gaignard added upstream support for the VeriSilicon IOMMU, which is found in front of hardware encoder and decoder blocks in several SoCs using VeriSilicon IP. The IOMMU translates the memory addresses used by those codec blocks and limits which areas of system memory they can access. The series initially supports the IOMMU implementation found on the Rockchip RK3588 SoC. It was tested with AV1 decoding using the stateless VPU driver and Fluster.
Detlev Casanova improved the Rockchip video decoder by replacing heavily unaligned bitfield structures with a shared bitwriter. The previous representation of hardware-control buffers could cause the compiler to generate unnecessarily large stack frames or, in some cases, hang during compilation. Detlev introduced a driver-wide bitwriter helper, replaced the separate H.264 and HEVC bitwriters, and converted the shared reference-picture-set and VDPU383 parameter buffers to use it. This makes the packed hardware layouts explicit, reduces duplicated code, and improves build reliability across compilers and architectures.
Modern browsers and graphics workloads can allocate large amounts of system memory for the GPU to use. A GPU driver must cooperate with the kernel’s memory-management system when the machine comes under pressure. Until now, the Panthor driver could not reclaim its GPU buffer objects. Boris Brezillon has added a GEM shrinker to Panthor so the system can reclaim GPU memory. The driver can now evict inactive GPU mappings and swap their backing pages out when the system needs memory. This happens transparently to applications and was tested with IGT as well as Chromium workloads deliberately pushed into reclaim and swap activity.
Boris Brezillon also restructured Panthor’s GEM implementation to stop using the drm_gem_shmem_object because its handling of sub-resources and their lifetimes prevented buffer-object reclaim. This work could also serve as the basis for a new gem-uma (Unified Memory Architecture) component-based library. The current implementation preserves buffer contents through swap; future improvements could allow disposable allocations such as tiler-heap chunks to be discarded and recreated instead.
Memory reclaim landed alongside a substantial set of Panthor reliability improvements from Boris and other contributors. These address interrupt sequencing, suspend and unplug paths, reset initialization, tiler out-of-memory handling, scheduler ticks, and fence locking. Nicolas Frattaroli also made evicted objects visible through Panthor’s GEM debug information.
These fixes are essential to making long-running desktop and graphics workloads dependable.
Linux 7.2 also advanced the shared Rust infrastructure needed by current and future GPU drivers. The Rust GPUVM immediate-mode abstraction from Alice Ryhl is now available in mainline Linux. This means that Tyr, the Rust driver for Arm Mali CSF GPUs, can rely on GPUVM to manage its address-space mapping. In response to this crucial abstraction landing upstream, Tyr developers have ramped up for the next phase of upstream development.
Deborah Brouwer added shared-memory backing for Tyr GEM objects and ensured that Tyr's clocks are released only after the resources that depend on them are released. Deborah, Daniel Almeida, and Boris Brezillon also converted Tyr’s register accesses to use Alexandre Courbot's new Rust-for-Linux register! macro. The macro replaces err-prone constants and manual bit operations with register fields of the correct width, preventing field values from being silently truncated.
Laura Nao added the Rust DRM feature flag needed for render nodes. When enabled, the driver exposes /dev/dri/renderDXX render nodes to userspace. The flag defaults to false, and drivers can opt in by setting it to true in their Driver implementation. Laura then enabled render nodes for the Tyr driver.
All of this work indicates upstream Tyr development is gaining momentum and we can expect more in the subsequent kernel releases.
Virtual machines increasingly run graphics and media workloads that create many GPU buffers, but not every buffer is mapped into the guest process. Dmitry Osipenko’s deferred-mapping driver hinting flag lets userspace tell Virtio-GPU to postpone the host mapping until the first actual mmap() invocation rather than when "mappable" BO is created. Buffers that are never mapped therefore no longer consume host virtual-memory resources unnecessarily. A corresponding Mesa change uses the new hint for Intel i915 native contexts.
Louis-Alexis Eyraud continued work on upstream MediaTek Genio platforms by formalizing support for the MT6365 power-management IC. The MT6365 PMIC cleanup series adds the missing Device Tree bindings for the PMIC and its RTC, auxiliary ADC, and power-key functions along with dedicated MT6365 definitions for supported boards: Genio 510, Genio 700, Genio 1200, and Radxa NIO 12L. Describing the actual PMIC instead of reusing the compatible MT6359 definitions improves the accuracy of the hardware model and prepares the same upstream support for newer Genio platforms.
Related device-tree updates from Louis-Alexis describe CPU and peripheral power supplies on Genio boards, including MT6319 and MT6360 regulator connections. This is the kind of platform work that allows upstream drivers to manage voltage rails correctly, improves suspend and power behavior, and reduces the need for board-specific downstream patches. AngeloGioacchino Del Regno reviewed and maintained this wider stream of MediaTek work, including Chromebook power descriptions, HDMI enablement, and SoC fixes.
Networking support also expanded with the Airoha AN8801R Gigabit Ethernet PHY driver developed by Angelo and Louis-Alexis. The driver supports the single-port 10/100/1000Mb/s PHY, including link management, interrupts, LEDs, and wake-on-LAN functionality. The series also factors common Airoha register access into a shared library, making subsequent PHY support easier to maintain. It was tested as part of early MediaTek Genio 720 enablement and gives boards using this component a fully upstream networking path.
Cristian Ciocaltea improved HDMI support across a broad set of RK3576 and RK3588 boards by wiring their dedicated frl-enable-gpios into the Device Trees. These GPIOs control a voltage-bias circuit on the HDMI data lines, which must be configured differently for HDMI 1.4/2.0 TMDS and HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link (FRL) mode. The changes ensure the correct configuration for the currently supported TMDS mode, independent of bootloader or hardware-reset state, while preparing boards including ROCK 5, Orange Pi 5, NanoPC-T6, and MNT Reform 2 for future FRL support. Cristian also contributed a series of Rockchip DisplayPort and HDMI lifetime and cleanup fixes, including protection against null-pointer and use-after-free paths during device removal.
Robert Mader fixed DRM’s plane color-pipeline capability handling so userspace can enable it only when the device actually exposes a color pipeline on at least one plane. Previously, the capability was accepted unconditionally, which could leave compositors and diagnostic tools without either the new color-pipeline interface or the legacy COLOR_ENCODING and COLOR_RANGE properties, breaking YUV-to-RGB conversion.
Matthew Leach improved hibernation reliability by changing when the kernel preallocates memory for the hibernation image. Matthew found that drivers were releasing unswappable resources only when preparing to freeze after the call to hibernate_preallocate_memory. Under heavy memory pressure, preallocation could therefore fail while drivers were still holding large amounts of unreclaimable memory. To solve this issue, Matthew moved preallocation until after the freeze-preparation stage, allowing drivers to make those resources swappable before hibernate_preallocate_memory runs its reclaim path.
Collabora also provides significant maintenance work for every kernel release and v7.2 is no exception. Sebastian Reichel maintained a broad set of power-supply changes, including initial battery and charger support for Microsoft Surface RT devices and a charger driver for Samsung S2M-series PMICs, alongside fixes for reference counting, suspend behavior, and charging-state reporting in existing drivers.
Nicolas Dufresne reviewed and helped integrate media work across the Rockchip RGA, Wave5, Meson and Cedrus drivers, including new hardware support, format handling, and reliability fixes.
Adrián Larumbe helped integrate Panfrost support for the Mali-G31 GPU in Renesas RZ/G3L systems. This work added the new SoC compatible, handled the GPU reset across runtime suspend and resume, supported the optional bus_ace clock used by related Renesas platforms, and simplified the driver’s optional-clock handling.
AngeloGioacchino Del Regno maintained a wide range of MediaTek platform updates. These improved the hardware descriptions for MediaTek Chromebooks, Genio systems, development boards, and networking devices by adding missing regulator supplies, HDMI support, LEDs, keys, flash, and CPU power connections. He also integrated fixes and infrastructure updates for MediaTek multimedia routing, command queues, PCIe, crypto offload, and several router platforms.
Dmitry Osipenko maintained a set of Virtio-GPU improvements that added support for host-provided blob-alignment requirements, from exposing the alignment through the userspace API to enforcing it when resources are created. This blob-alignment support is a prerequisite for enabling Virtio-GPU on Apple Silicon platforms, where the system uses 64 KiB memory pages instead of the traditional 4 KiB pages. He also integrated fixes that prevent oversized EDID reads and make framebuffer plane updates safer when acquiring reservation locks.
Across these areas, review, integration, and subsystem maintenance help turn individual submissions into changes that distributions and product teams can safely build upon.
Below is a full list of contributions made by Collabora for the 7.2 release, as recorded in the git commit history:
AngeloGioacchino Del Regno:
Benjamin Gaignard:
Boris Brezillon:
Cristian Ciocaltea:
Daniel Almeida:
Deborah Brouwer:
Detlev Casanova:
Dmitry Osipenko:
Laura Nao:
Louis-Alexis Eyraud:
Matthew Leach:
Michael Riesch:
Nicolas Frattaroli:
Robert Mader:
Sebastian Reichel:
Adrián Larumbe:
AngeloGioacchino Del Regno:
Boris Brezillon:
Dmitry Osipenko:
Sebastian Reichel:
Daniel Almeida:
Deborah Brouwer:
Nicolas Dufresne:
Robert Mader:
Adrián Larumbe:
AngeloGioacchino Del Regno:
Benjamin Gaignard:
Boris Brezillon:
Daniel Almeida:
Michael Riesch:
Nicolas Dufresne:
Nicolas Frattaroli:
Pekka Paalanen:
Sebastian Reichel:
Boris Brezillon:
Daniel Almeida:
Dmitry Osipenko:
Sebastian Reichel:
Boris Brezillon:
Deborah Brouwer:
Louis-Alexis Eyraud:
Martyn Welch:
Nicolas Frattaroli:
18/08/2026
Linux kernel 7.2 adds broad core, Rust, and hardware-support updates, with Collabora contributing 102 patches across graphics, media, virtualization,…
12/08/2026
Collabora and MediaTek continue expanding upstream support across the Genio IoT family, with HDMI 2.0 now enabled for existing boards, Genio…
30/07/2026
Kraid, the new compiler for the Panfrost driver stack, now passes all Vulkan CTS compute shader tests. This marks a major milestone, with…
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