Linus Torvalds has released the 7.3 kernel, as expected.
It's Sunday afternoon, and this week I somehow kept my wits together long enough to keep track of the day of the week, so the release isn't randomly delayed. Will wonders never cease?
Anyway, nothing very special seems to have happened this last week, so as expected the final 7.3 is out, and thus tomorrow the merge window for 7.4 opens. Except I'm on my annual family vacation, so instead of merging anything first thing in the morning, I'll spend most of the day on a boat and under water. I'll get back to merging in the afternoon, but I expect my schedule to be a bit unusual for a while.
This release is a record-breaker on all fronts; it brought in 18,765 non-merge commits from 3,021 developers, 807 of whom were first-time kernel developers.
Significant changes in this release include some significant binfmt_misc extensions, some group-scheduling work aimed at improving performance on large systems, the new failfs filesystem that fails all operations, the fchroot() system call, global per-CPU data for BPF programs, the completion of the sched_ext subscheduler feature, working-set tracking for virtual machines, alternative data-stream support in the ntfs3 filesystem, a long list of SMB server improvements, and much more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 7.3 page for details.
Comments
jpeisach · 2026-10-18
yay!
looking forward to the final dev stats!
swilmet · 2026-10-19
Recent documentation / introductory books for newcomers
For consuming kernel features from userspace, there is the The Linux Programming Interface (thick) book, but the latest edition dates back from 2010; thankfully there is a page listing what's new since then.
For an introductory book/documentation about Linux kernel development itself, what would you recommend nowadays? I know there is Linux Device Drivers, but it becomes a bit old I suppose.
What resources would you recommend nowadays?
(It's just for my own curiosity, but answering the question could help other readers).
eru · 2026-10-19
I believe one recommended stating point is https://kernelnewbies.org/.
teknohog · 2026-10-19
Submerge before merge
> I'll spend most of the day on a boat and under water. I'll get back to merging in the afternoon
So before the Linux merge window, there's the Linus submerge window. (I'll get my coat!)
zdzichu · 2026-10-19
Quote of the week material.
