Observatorio Blockchain reported on October 31, 2026, that RISC-V changes merged into Linux 7.4 on October 30 shifted selection of a fast user-memory-copy path to a hardware-capability check during startup. On processors that support fast misaligned accesses, the path skips software realignment. The change is intended to let a generic kernel image select the fast path only on compatible hardware.
How Linux 7.4 reportedly selects the copy path
The equivalent Linux 7.3 optimization relied on a compile-time setting for efficient misaligned access. The reported Linux 7.4 approach checks hardware capability during startup instead. Tenstorrent engineer Andy Chiu reportedly sent the patch series in September 2026.
What the performance figures measure
The reported figure of up to 11% comes from earlier Tenstorrent tests of memory-copy bandwidth with an equivalent Linux 7.3 optimization. It describes bandwidth, not a general application-performance gain.
Separately, a chart shared in the r/RISCV thread labels its workload “Misaligned user copy, size: 512B” and gives the offset as “[0:15] except 0, 8.” Its four results are:
| Hardware label | Write improvement over baseline | Read improvement over baseline |
| K3 | +6.19% | +3.43% |
| Ascalon | +10.00% | +11.40% |
