Linux Kernel 7.3-rc3 ships, with the filesystems hogging the spotlight once again
Linus Torvalds shipped the third weekly release candidate Sunday, and it's yet another large one. The 7.3 kernel is targeting the second half of October for its stable debut.
In the release announcement, Torvalds calls it "another fairly large rc" with a filesystem footprint larger than usual for a cycle this early. But he was quick to clarify that the real bulk of the work is still drivers. Sound and networking lead the pack, GPU code shows up but stays modest, and a healthy pile of core-kernel and arch fixes rounds it out.
Keep in mind that release-candidate counting gets a little fuzzy. Torvalds's post touts 513 distinct patches from 216 unique contributors. The git window between rc2 and rc3, meanwhile, holds roughly 733 commits, because that number also sweeps in each maintainer's merge commit plus the final release commit itself. Don't let the two numbers spook you. They measure different things.
"The bulk of the rc3 patch is still the driver side," Torvalds said. "Mainly sound and networking drivers this time around: gpu drivers show up, but they aren't really all that big."
The size trend is real, though. At 7.3-rc1 the tree was sitting at about 40.98 million lines. That's up from 40.42M at the 7.2 baseline. The AMDGPU driver alone now claims 6.52M lines, roughly 16 percent of the whole kernel. To put that in perspective, you could delete most of the GPU codebase and still end up with more lines than the rest of Linux combined.
The filesystems did the loud work
XFS is the single biggest pull-request machine this cycle. Darrick J. Wong alone pushed 50 patches, mostly scrubber and repair hardening. Christoph Hellwig added 11, largely lock-annotation fixes. The rest of the XFS crowd includes Anuj Gupta, Hans Holmberg, Lin Jiapeng, and Zizhi Wo, plus a bit of SMB-adjacent churn from Paolo.
The SMB client is getting a hardening pass after a long stretch of chinks. Paulo Abeni brought 8 patches covering uid/gid overrides, WSL reparse points, file-type corruption fixes, and a one-byte out-of-bounds read that was lurking in native symlink parsing. Diego Oliva, Bjoern Doebel, Aohan Mei, and Fan Wu rounded out the set, tightening READ response handling, refcounts, and a DACL heap overflow that genuinely deserves attention.
Other storage work didn't sleep either. netfs and afs (David Howells, 12 patches) fixed partial-transfer error returns, i_size updates, and a pile of map-and-unmap bugs. erofs temporarily disabled LZ4 rolling decompression over data-corruption concerns and added a sysfs entry for xattr prefixes. btrfs tightened its tree-checker and fixed transaction-commit fallbacks.
Drivers still own the kernel
Torvalds wasn't wrong about the drivers being the point. Sound work is enormous: Intel SoundWire/SOF fixes, Realtek quirks, TI TAS/RT codec patches, and a major ab8500/ux500 audio-block repair (Linus Walleij alone did 20). Networking is everywhere, from mlx5e and macb to ice/nfp rule-dump bounding and tx_queue_len caps meant to stop oversized ring allocations.
Architecture fixes didn't get skipped either. s390/crypto picked up an 11-patch series from Harald Freudenberger, fixing skcipher-walk return codes, temp-buffer scrubbing for AES/PAES, and mutex-in-atomic bugs. powerpc got entry-time double-accounting fixes and KUAP/RESTOREALL syscall-restart handling. Landlock got a use-after-free fix plus some selftests.
Hardening, fuzzers, and the AI-Assisted Patches
Here's the part that keeps resurfacing. Many rc3 commits carry Assisted-by: Claude or Assisted-by: LLM trailers in their commit footers, a quiet tell that the tooling is now part of the workflow. It helps surface bugs and generate patches in equal measure.
Security is a throughline for this release. A large share of rc3 is memory-safety fixes, many surfaced by syzbot fuzzers or shops like doyensec and nebusec. Use-after-free bugs turned up across openvswitch, af_unix, mlx5 eswitch, nsfs, landlock, and virtio. Heap and stack overflows landed in the SMB client, ppp_async, iommu/riscv, and the media tile-count validation, where Michael Bommarito's 8-patch series stood out. Refcount leaks straggled across virtio_ring/pci, cifs, and Bluetooth runtime PM.
It's not the flashiest headline, but it's arguably the right one. The kernel is getting defended in proportion to how fast new code is being pushed upstream.
For background, the full 7.3 cycle is shaping up to be a meaty one. The feature list touches Zen 6 client enablement, Intel's Xe3P "Nova Lake" iGPU going default-on, a Btrfs performance push, KSMBD interoperability with Apple Time Machine backups, the FailFS merge, and Apple M3 Pro/Max/Ultra bring-up. In-kernel Rust is even starting to show up on PowerPC.
As for rc3 itself, Torvalds left you with the usual advice: "Please keep testing." Download the release, boot it on a box you don't mind breaking, and start piling bugs back into the tracker. The stable target is the second half of October, so you've got time.
Linux kernel 7.3-rc3 released
Linux kernel version 7.3-rc3 is now available:
Full source: https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/t/linux-7.3-rc3.tar.gz
Patch: https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/p/v7.3-rc3/v7.2
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/ds/v7.3-rc3/v7.3-rc2
