The Maintainers Summit is a one-day, invitation-only gathering of about 30 kernel developers; it is held once each year to discuss policy-related issues that are not always amenable to resolution via email. The 2026 event was scheduled for October 8 in Prague, Czechia. Unsurprisingly, the discussion there was dominated by large language models (LLMs) and their effect on the development community, but some time was also found to talk about security bugs and long-term succession planning.

The 7.3-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing. According to Linus: "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."

One notable change that slipped into the mainline this week is the deprecation of the ext4 data=journal mode; it will be removed entirely at the beginning of 2028.