As a long time desktop and server user, why do I look at changelogs...

New filesystems and major changes to existing ones (large performance improvements, new features like adding better compression standards which I now know I can use, fixes to long-standing bugs which open new use cases).

New protocols like wireguard when it was new and exciting (still is now that I think of it). When that was mainlined, I knew I had some network rearchitecting to do.

New device drivers like amdgpu when it was massive news. Less so these days since most hardware is well supported, and I don't buy the absolute latest.

New kernel APIs which I can use in my programs — like landlock, when it was merged I knew it was time to improve sandboxing in some of my stuff.

Though LWN and kernel newbies do it best, already linked by others.

It's a well-formatted changelog of the most salient features of the release. Linus doesn't provide one apart from a list of added commits and merged branches, which isn't very useful unless you are a kernel developer.

This isn't quite right.

This is a well-formatted changelog of the changes that Igalia has contributed to the release, AFAICT.

KernelNewbies publishes a much more general summary of changes (it is much longer than this one).

https://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges

https://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxVersions

What great resource thank you !

This new thing is pretty cool :

    =USB4STREAM for streaming data with USB4=

    In addition to Thunderbolt networking, which was already supported, this release adds support for streaming data directly over a cable as well (USB4STREAM). It is very simple and basically just transfers raw packets from one host to another. The driver exposes /dev/tbstreamX devices on each side of the link that can be used to transfer data using regular filesystem operations such as read(2) and write(2):

    host1 # cat /dev/tbstream0
    host2 # echo hello > /dev/tbstream0

    This can be useful in cases where network tooling is not available or just for existing applications like dd and cat that do not support sockets. This feature can be used at the same time with thunderbolt_net so they don't rule each other out, and it allows multiple streams to be created.

It only covers changes made by Igalia devs. For a more general changelog I’d recommend the LWN articles:

https://lwn.net/Articles/1078068/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1078539/

ty for the context. I was not aware of the Linux dev ecosystem.

I think it is mostly "marketing" for Igalia's services. If you want to pay people to do "stuff" in Linux and adjacent projects like Mesa, Igalia seems very competent.

Exactly. My immediate reaction was: A violation of HN submission guidelines. Linux is project of many contributors / companies. For sure Igalia is a valuable contributor and I would not doubt to recommend them for serious Linux work, but this "article" is pure marketing.

https://lwn.net/Articles/1088991/ has all the relevant links. Probably somewhwere there is also a more detailed "neutral" article.

We publish something about all the work Igalia has contributed with each release. Fwiw, we didn't submit this ourselves, but it's cool someone thought it was interesting enough to share. In context, the title is fine, but as shared I can definitely understand the confusion.

> Who is the main audience for this type of content?

I make technology decisions at a large embedded shop that makes cars.

Content like this tells me Igalia has serious programmers and is relevant upstream. The memory sticks.

It's also informative, which makes me feel good.

They're a consultancy. It's good for business.

I'm using a recently released laptop, and Linux hardware support hasn't caught up yet. So I've been following the changelogs of recent kernel releases to understand the current state of support.

I'd say mostly sys admins type users that want to stay on top of things?

I install Linux on a wide variety of hardware for both work and personal reasons.

I don't read the detailed changelogs religiously but after years of paying some attention to them I can understand most of it and see where the industry is investing developer efforts, what cool new hardware is gaining support and what new security or performance features people are focusing on.

hi audience, we know about this stuff you use on a daily basis, you may be interested in our executive summary of the latest release of the stuff

I look for wake from sleep fixes, nvidia the primary offender there (they have at least two bugs affecting it across several driver versions). But my intel wifi driver (BE200) also has an apparent hard lock on wake. Looks like this particular release doesn't have any fixes for me, though claude says its not the full change list.

Intel has a specific series of integrated network cards that softlock themselves and you can only fix by disconnecting power for 30s, reconnecting the power, then rebooting the PC twice.

Living through that made me wonder why people would ever swap out their Broadcom or Atheros WiFi card for an Intel one.

It happens on MediaTek wifi adapter cards as well (and the AMD ones that are just rebadged MediaTek).

It's the sort of content I expect to see on HackerNews, rather than popular science/technology-type journalism.

I for one am excited about HDMI 2.1 support on AMD.

It's more than that: free and open support for HDMI 2.1 in general. Previously it was only proprietary implementations that didn't leak the spec which were allowed. AMD is just the only one that has really good open source drivers which can benefit from it, and didn't work around the problem by converting HDMI to DisplayPort in a proprietary on-board GPU chip.

Intel only used the converters for 1st gen Arc dGPUs. Battlemage has native HDMI 2.1 and also ran into the same issues as AMD.

Wasn’t it the same with m1 macs, it also had a converter chip and did therefore only support hdmi 2.0.

OK, now this is what I wanted to know as well. I was not aware that changelogs show all this inf.

ty for sharing

It’s intrinsically interesting

I don't think there is much too it, it's a consulting firm. Would you hire a consulting firm with an empty tech blog portifolio? It's ticking a box, it's stating it's a consulting firm in tech, that it's target audience are companies with Linux machines etc...

ty. so very narrow audicence it seems.

Per @sph, as Linus provide no changelog, seems like the firm is putting it together for others

Wouldn't have HN any other way. For better or worse, it's the best sorta proving grounds for writers. Pass the trial of fire and chances are you did something right.

I'd count my losses and move on happy that it hit front page.

It's not a Linux 7.2 changelog, it's a list of things Igalia worked on that's included in this release.