In working toward the stable Linux 7.3 kernel release hopefully on 18 October, out today is Linux 7.3-rc5 as the newest weekly test candidate.

Linux kernel development continues to be as busy as ever, driven in large part by AI/LLM agents continuing to uncover new issues in the nearly 41 million line codebase. Plus new hardware continuing to come to market, the never ending stream of device quirks, and the more typical bug/regression fixes. Merged for Linux 7.3-rc5 include more Cache Aware Scheduling fixes, support for some new mice and other HID devices, reverting Logitech Holt Receiver HID++ support due to issues, and numerous kernel graphics driver fixes.

Linus Torvalds wrote in today's 7.3-rc5 announcement:

"Another week, another large rc.

The diffstat looks a bit unusual. Less than a third of the patch is drivers, and a quarter is just selftests. Now, that's admittedly a bit misleading: most of the driver patches are rather small, and some of the selftest patches are much bigger (the biggest patch in here is the arm64 kvm ITS table test, I think). So counting the number of commits it skews quite differently. But that diffstat is still a bit unusual.

Not *bad* unusual, just not what I typically see.

The rest is mostly architecture fixes (largely kvm-related, some perf) and a fair amount of core kernel (both scheduler and bpf). And
networking, of course. Most of the driver side is networking too (with drm showing up as a close second). That part is decidedly _not_ unusual.

There's various other scattered fixes in here too - core vfs, some xfs. I don't think there's any real pattern to it other than "big". But nothing looks particularly alarming, I think that despite the difftstat it's just the same old, same old.

Please keep testing,

Linus"

See our Linux 7.3 feature overview for a look at all the interesting features of this next kernel release. Linux 7.3 is powering the likes of Ubuntu 26.10 and other autumn Linux distributions upon its October release.