[Posted October 18, 2026 by corbet]
It's Sunday afternoon, and this week I somehow kept my wits together lengthy adequate to keep track of the day of the week, so the release isn't randomly delayed. Will wonders never cease?Anyway, nothing extremely particular seems to have happened this final 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 item archetypal item in the morning, I'll spend most of the day on a container and under water. I'll get rear to merging in the afternoon, but I anticipate my agenda to be a bit different for a while.
This publish 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 publish contain several significant binfmt_misc extensions, several group-scheduling work aimed at improving achievement on ample systems, the new failfs filesystem that fails all operations, the fchroot() scheme call, global per-CPU data for BPF programs, the completion of the sched_ext subscheduler feature, working-set tracking for virtual machines, alternative data-stream support in the ntfs3 filesystem, a long list of SMB server improvements, and much more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 7.3 page for details.
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