Linus Torvalds has made available what is hopefully the final release candidate before Linux 7.3 is ideally minted next Sunday.

Linux 7.3-rc7 is out and continues with the "new normal" of AI-heavy patches leading to increased patch activity late in the kernel cycle. This week some of the late changes include an AMD TLBI erratum workaround in the kernel, a lot of networking fixes, and adding two new game controllers to the XPad driver. Plus the plethora of small random fixes from AI coding agents throughout the kernel source tree.

Linus Torvalds wrote in today's 7.3-rc7 announcement:

"Ok, so this is six hours late. Not because of any issues, but purely due to incompetence. I'd like to say that I was jetlagged to the travel for the kernel maintainer summit and LPC, but the reality is that - probably still due to said travel - I was mentally off by a whole day and was thinking it was Saturday the whole day.

Until it struck me over dinner that no, it's Sunday, and I should have done the rc earlier this afternoon.

Oops.

Anyway, here we are, and at least I got this last rc out the right day. If barely.

The diffstat is slightly strange, with half the rc7 patch being selftests. Most of that is because there were several mount-related bugs fixed, and while the fixes themselves were fairly small, the selftests for the fixes are more noticeable.

If you ignore the tools/testing/ directory, things look normal: half drivers (drm and networking), and the rest is spread all over the place, although the vfs layer is somewhat prominent due to aforementioned mount fixes (along with some smaller normal filesystem-specific fixes). All the usual suspects: core networking and architecture fixes etc.

Shortlog appended. As always, I would have preferred to see a smaller rc, but it's not like anything in here looks like a reason to delay the final release. So that's still set for next weekend unless something new comes up."

See the Linux 7.3 feature overview for a look at all of the changes coming in this next kernel version. Here's to hoping Linux 7.3 stable makes out out next Sunday, 18 October, without needing a Linux 7.3-rc8 candidate.