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Linux 7.3 Sets a New Kernel Commit Record: What’s New
18,765 commits, 3,021 developers, including 807 first-time contributors: Linux 7.3 is the most loaded release in Linux kernel history. But beyond that record, what’s new? Here’s the essential information you need to know.
On October 18, 2026, Linus Torvalds released the final version of Linux 7.3. In his announcement on the kernel mailing list, he said that the final week of development, after RC7, did not bring any particular issues.
The numbers, however, are anything but ordinary. According to LWN.net, Linux 7.3 sets records across the board: 18,765 commits (excluding merge commits), 3,021 developers, and 807 new contributors. That is massive, and yet it is still fairly close to the previous record held by Linux 6.7, released in January 2024, with 17,284 changes. That said, it is worth noting that the total at the time was somewhat inflated, since the integration of bcachefs with all its development history accounted for nearly 3,000 commits on its own.
Even so, Linus Torvalds remains calm and says he is heading off on a family vacation: "I’ll spend most of the day on a boat and underwater," he says. So the next merges will have to wait a few hours.
How can such numbers be explained? No official count measures the share of AI, but it is affecting the volume of fixes. In August, when publishing 7.2-rc7, Linus Torvalds was already talking about a "new normal, with lots of fixes, many of them coming from code review by various AI tools". During the 7.3 cycle, maintainers of the network subsystem felt it too: "We are completely overwhelmed, of course," Jakub Kicinski wrote in his merge request.
What does Linus Torvalds think about it? It has to be said that his stance has evolved. In May, I covered his outburst against the flood of AI-generated bug reports, which made the security mailing list “unmanageable.” In July, however, he said that "Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects", and told opponents to fork it or move on. In early October, he even developed a kernel branch with Claude Code designed to speed up page cache reads. At the same time, the Maintainers Summit decided to drop the "Assisted-by" tag, which identified contributions made with an AI tool. That is quite a shift in position.
Linux 7.3: the main new features
Here are the key changes included in Linux 7.3:
- Video memory: on a graphics card with limited VRAM, a game could have its data pushed into system memory (GTT), which is slower, because other applications had already filled the VRAM before it ran. Linux 7.3 makes the protection provided by the dmem cgroup controller effective: the kernel first evicts data from unprotected applications. This work, carried out by Natalie Vock for Valve, helps optimize gaming performance.
- Scheduler: process group (cgroup) management has been redesigned to distribute CPU time more evenly on machines with many cores, with four weight distribution methods. Support for sched_ext sub-schedulers is now complete: each cgroup can be driven by its own BPF scheduler.
- File systems: ext4 improves parallel direct I/O writes, a mode widely used by databases. A new simplified path in iomap raises ext4 from 1.92 to 2.19 million IOPS in a test workload. Btrfs was not left out: its direct I/O reaches about 95% of theoretical throughput, compared with 50% before.
- Process isolation: the new failfs pseudo-file system, where every operation fails, comes with a fchroot() system call. A process that places its root on failfs can no longer resolve any absolute path: it must rely on file descriptors opened beforehand. A useful new feature for sandboxing.
- SMB server: ksmbd optionally supports Apple Time Machine extensions, as well as SMB3 encryption enforced on a per-share basis.
If you want more details, I encourage you to read this page.
When will you be able to use it?
If you are on Ubuntu 26.10, it is already there, or almost. Released on October 15, this interim version ships with Linux 7.3 as a release candidate. The final version should therefore arrive there quickly.
For your production servers, there is no need to rush: Debian, Ubuntu LTS, and enterprise distributions stay on long-term-supported kernels with security fixes backported. The next release, Linux 7.4, is expected in December 2026.
