Greg Kroah-Hartman announced Linux kernel 7.0.4 today, May 7, 2026, as the latest stable update in the 7.0 series. The release is available now from kernel.org.
Users running Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Fedora 44, Arch Linux, and other distributions that ship 7.0-series kernels should expect this update to arrive through their package manager shortly. This is a stability and bug fix release. It introduces no new features.
That said, some of the fixes in this build are immediately meaningful for a wide range of users. The RDNA4 boot crash alone affects everyone who purchased one of AMD’s latest-generation discrete graphics cards and tried to run Linux on it.
Several other fixes address issues that were quietly causing corruption, crashes, and misbehavior in production environments without leaving obvious traces.
The most impactful fix for desktop users targets the AMDGPU driver. AMD RDNA4 graphics cards, including the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT that launched in early 2026, were triggering a fatal kernel assertion during module loading on certain system configurations.
The root cause was the driver attempting to register Global Data Share memory resources even when the hardware reported a size of zero. The kernel treated that as an error condition and refused to continue loading the driver, leaving users with a black screen or a kernel oops trace at boot.
Version 7.0.4 adds a guard that skips GDS registration entirely when the resource is absent, allowing the graphics stack to initialize correctly on affected hardware. For users who have been working around this with older kernel versions or custom patches, this fix removes that need.
Memory management received two separate patches in this release, both addressing situations where silent corruption could occur.
The first targets the slab allocator on single-processor kernel builds. Non-maskable interrupts arriving during specific internal slab operations were triggering re-entry into code paths that held spinlocks, corrupting the allocator’s internal state.
When kernel debugging options were active, this surfaced as BUG reports. When they were not, it accumulated silently until something more obvious failed. The fix forces an early return in the affected NMI paths, keeping the allocator state consistent regardless of interrupt timing.
The second memory management fix addresses a buffer overflow in the vmalloc subsystem. When a vmalloc allocation was shrunk, the internal accounting could allow a subsequent write to land just past the new boundary of the allocation.
This class of bug is particularly difficult to diagnose because it does not cause an immediate crash. It corrupts memory that belongs to something else, and the failure appears later, usually in a completely unrelated component. The fix corrects the boundary calculation during shrink operations.
Networking fixes in 7.0.4 cover two distinct problems that both carry security implications.
Netfilter, the kernel’s packet filtering framework, was accepting bitwise expression rules that specified a zero shift operand. Processing those rules triggered undefined behavior in the kernel, which, on certain architectures and compiler versions, produced silent crashes rather than a clean error.
The fix adds a validation step that rejects any rule containing a zero shift before it reaches the evaluation path. Firewall administrators running complex nftables rulesets should apply this update promptly.
The second networking fix addresses a race condition in IPv6 segment routing and RPL tunnel handling on PREEMPT_RT kernels. When two threads concurrently accessed the same nexthop destination cache entry while one thread was releasing it, a use-after-free condition could occur.
This category of bug is particularly relevant for systems running containerized workloads or heavy virtualization where the IPv6 routing stack handles a high volume of concurrent connections.
Virtualization stability is addressed through improvements to nested SVM support. Nested virtualization, where a virtual machine runs its own hypervisor hosting a second guest, requires extremely careful tracking of guest state across transitions.
The 7.0.4 fix ensures that VMRUN failures are handled correctly and that guest register state is fully synchronized before execution resumes after a failed transition.
Without this fix, nested VM setups could resume execution with stale or inconsistent guest state, producing behavior that ranged from guest instability to host-level corruption depending on the workload. Filesystem drivers received bounds checking improvements in both NTFS3 and ext2.
The NTFS3 driver now validates buffer boundaries before accessing journal metadata. Previously, a crafted or corrupted NTFS volume could cause the driver to read past the end of an allocated buffer during mount or journal replay, potentially leaking kernel memory or triggering a panic.
The ext2 driver gains a check that rejects inodes reporting a zero link count, which indicates on-disk corruption. Mounting a corrupted ext2 image without this check could allow the driver to operate on metadata it should have refused, with unpredictable consequences for the host system.
For most users, applying this update is a straightforward matter of running the standard package manager update command for their distribution. Arch Linux users on the 7.0 kernel will see it through pacman.
Ubuntu 26.04 users will receive it via apt once the Canonical kernel team packages it. Fedora 44 users will find it through dnf. Users who compile their own kernels can pull the source tarball and patch directly from the kernel’s dedicated page.
The complete diff between 7.0.3 and 7.0.4 is browsable at the official kernel Git repository at the Git Kernel’s page.
