The reported 6,753 changes in Linux 7.4’s development tree were a provisional snapshot dated October 23, not a stable release. The count excludes merge commits. Separate reporting described scheduler updates for the in-development kernel, including changes to short-task latency, virtual CPUs and cache data.
What the 6,753 changes count
Observatorio Blockchain reported on October 24 that Linux 7.4’s merge window had opened on October 19, the day after Linux 7.3’s reported October 18 release. Its October 23 snapshot counted 6,753 non-merge changes in the Linux 7.4 development tree.
That figure is an early count from the integration period, when proposed kernel changes are being incorporated. It describes development activity, not a stable, production-ready version of Linux 7.4.
Scheduler updates reported for Linux 7.4
Phoronix reported on October 22 that scheduler updates had been merged into the in-development Linux 7.4 kernel. The work covers several distinct areas, not just task latency.
One set of EEVDF changes concerns short-slice tasks, which run for brief periods before yielding the processor. Phoronix reported up to 55% lower latency for those tasks in the tests it described. That result applies to the reported workloads, rather than establishing a performance gain for every system or task.
The reported changes also include a steal governor for managing virtual CPUs (vCPUs) based on hypervisor steal time, with the aim of reducing the costs of vCPU preemption. For NVIDIA Vera CPUs, the scheduler is reported to prefer SMT siblings, the related hardware threads handled by simultaneous multithreading.
Two other changes concern how the scheduler handles idle cores and cache statistics. It can choose randomly among idle CPU cores at the same depth, and a fix prevents partial last-level-cache (LLC) utilization data from being published.
The reported schedule and submission cutoff
The October 24 account described November 1, 2026, as the expected close of the usual two-week merge window. It gave November 8 as a possible close if the window were extended by one week. The corresponding Linux 7.4-rc1 dates were also projections: November 1 or November 8, depending on the schedule.
The same account attributed the possible extension to Linus Torvalds’s need for more time to process pull requests already in the queue. It said the extra week would not reopen submissions for maintainers who missed the usual cutoff; late changes would wait for Linux 7.5.
