Linux 7.2 ships cache-aware scheduling and up to 5% more IOPS on EXT4 and XFS

On August 16, 2026, Linus Torvalds released the stable Linux 7.2 kernel after seven release candidates, bringing cache-aware scheduling, USB4STREAM host-to-host transfers, and measured gains on EXT4, XFS, and MongoDB. For administrators, this is a performance release that arrives through the standard distro kernel update — the real work is testing MySQL and MongoDB workloads before rolling it out.