Linux to Drop Arm64 Big-Endian Support, Parallel CPU Boot Coming in 7.4
Arm64 maintainer Will Deacon posted a 14-patch series on September 7 to remove big-endian kernel support from the arm64 architecture, targeting the Linux 7.4 merge window. The removal follows a staged deprecation process that began in kernel 6.18, when big-endian builds were marked as broken, and the series already has acknowledgements from four senior maintainers. A separate 19-patch proposal would enable parallel secondary CPU onlining on arm64 via PSCI firmware, with benchmarks showing boot time reductions of 41 to 65 percent. Elsewhere, Linux 7.3-rc2 arrived larger than expected due to scheduler fixes for cache-aware load balancing on hybrid CPUs. Buildroot 2026.08 also shipped this week with nearly 1,000 changes, including GCC 16 and glibc 2.44 support, while kernel.org reported that AI crawlers now account for roughly one-fifth of its git infrastructure traffic.
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