---
title: Linux 7.3 Released
link: https://lwn.net/Articles/1101143/
source: hnrss-org
published: 2026-10-19T07:23:57Z
updated: 2026-10-19T07:23:57Z
first_seen: 2026-10-19T12:57:26.464953148Z
authors:
- cjd8
content: extracted
html: 2026-10-19-linux-7-3-released.html
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---

Linus Torvalds has [released](https://lwn.net/Articles/1101170/) 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](https://lwn.net/Articles/1086947/), some [group-scheduling work](https://lwn.net/Articles/1089244/#:~:text=There%20have%20been%20some%20subtle%20but%20significant%20changes) aimed at improving performance on large systems, the new [failfs](https://docs.kernel.org/next/filesystems/failfs.html) filesystem that fails all operations, the `fchroot()` system call, global per-CPU data for BPF programs, the [completion](https://lwn.net/Articles/1082717/) of [the sched\_ext subscheduler feature](https://lwn.net/Articles/1056014/), [working-set tracking](https://lwn.net/Articles/1080162/#uffd) for virtual machines, [alternative data-stream support](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=be310476e8868ebe7a2ce8fb0e7b229535723963) in the ntfs3 filesystem, a [long list of SMB server improvements](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=61a09cfc121472013f99ae75066676739a5db626), and much more. See the LWN merge-window summaries ([part 1](https://lwn.net/Articles/1089244/), [part 2](https://lwn.net/Articles/1089791/)) and [the KernelNewbies 7.3 page](https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_7.3) for details.