Linus Torvalds released the 7.3 kernel, at the end of the usual nine-week development cycle, on October 18. This cycle, abundantly fueled by LLM-assisted contributions, broke just about every record imaginable. As usual, we have compiled some statistics showing how this release, which is expected to be the next long-term-support (LTS) kernel, came together. Also included is an attempt to determine whether automated patch review is actually reducing the number of bugs introduced into the kernel.

Linus Torvalds has released the 7.3 kernel, as expected.

It's Sunday afternoon, and this week I somehow kept my wits together long enough to keep track of the day of the week, so the release isn't randomly delayed. Will wonders never cease?

Anyway, nothing very special seems to have happened this last 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 anything first thing in the morning, I'll spend most of the day on a boat and under water. I'll get back to merging in the afternoon, but I expect my schedule to be a bit unusual for a while.

This release 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 release include some significant binfmt_misc extensions, some group-scheduling work aimed at improving performance on large systems, the new failfs filesystem that fails all operations, the fchroot() system 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.