Linux 7.2.15 is the last 7.2 release; the branch reaches end of life early
Serguey Asael Shinder1 min readGreg Kroah-Hartman announced the 7.2.15 kernel on 1 November with a handful of updates, and with a note that it is the last 7.2.y release: after it, the 7.2.y tree is end of life, and users should move to 7.3.y.
He acknowledged that the branch reached end of life a little sooner than normal. His reasoning was the current release cycle and the number of pending patches tagged for stable: continuing 7.2 would have required keeping eight different branches alive at the same time, "a taxing task under the best of times", and ending it lets the stable team focus on the latest 7.3.y release.
What it means
For most users this is a non-event, since distributions ship either a long-term kernel or follow the newest stable series. It matters for anyone who pinned 7.2 on their own, on a build server, an appliance image or a hand-rolled distribution: from now on fixes land only in 7.3.y and the long-term branches, and a pinned 7.2 quietly stops receiving them. The early cut is also a reminder of the stable team's limits: the number of live branches, not the calendar, decides how long a non-LTS series is supported.