The PowerPC pull request has already been sent in for the now open Linux 7.3 merge window. The headline feature this cycle on the POWER side is Rust kernel support for PowerPC 32-bit PPC32BE big endian and PowerPC 64-bit PPC64LE little endian architectures.

The PowerPC 32-bit big endian and 64-bit little endian support for Linux kernel Rust usage joins ARM 32-bit, ARM64, LoongArch, RISC-V, UM, and x86_64 as the other CPU architectures so far supporting the Linux kernel Rust code.

Initially the Rust PPC Linux patches were treating the support as "experimental" but ultimately the code set to be merged for Linux 7.3 is marking it as "maintained" following various adjustment patches.

In addition to enabling the Rust kernel support for PowerPC, the updates for Linux 7.3 include base enablement work on POWER12. Next-generation POWER12 is seeing enablement work starting with Linux 7.3 around the Power12 Base Performance Monitoring, Power12 raw mode, and Power12 architected mode features. More work on enabling POWER12 support will likely continue into future kernel cycles. Since last year we've already been seeing open-source compiler activity for what is likely POWER12 too.

The rest of the IBM POWER changes for Linux 7.3 consist mostly of fixes and other low-level updates as outlined in this pull request.