Linux 7.3-rc3 Released: "Another Fairly Large RC"

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 13 September 2026 at 06:00 PM EDT. 3 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
Out today is the third weekly release candidate of Linux 7.3 as this next kernel version works its way toward a stable release in the second half of October.

Linux 7.3 continues being quite a busy cycle as was forecasted by Greg Kroah-Hartman early on in the cycle. This week brought many more fixes brewed via AI/LLMs. Among the notable fixes this week was EROFS disabling LZ4 rolling decompression due to data corruption possibilities that will take time to address.

Linux 7.3-rc3  Git tag


Linus Torvalds wrote in today's 7.3-rc3 announcement:
"Another fairly large rc release, and again one with a bigger filesystem footprint that we usually see. This time it's mainly xfs and the smb client, with some netfs and afs fixes (but also erofs and btrfs).

Of course, "bigger filesystem footprint that we usually see" doesn't mean huge: the *bulk* of the rc3 patch is still the driver side. Mainly sound and networking drivers this time around: gpu drivers show up, but they aren't really all that big. And various other stragglers.

The rest is all over: various core kernel and networking fixes, some landlock fixes (and selftests), arch fixes - mainly s390 and powerpc this time around."

See our Linux 7.3 feature overview for a recap of all the interesting changes coming in this kernel version.
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