The 7.3 kernel has been released

Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 7.3 kernel on a Sunday afternoon, as the release was not randomly delayed. The week had seen no significant events, so the final version of 7.3 was released, marking the opening of the merge window for the upcoming 7.4 version. The author, currently on a family vacation, would resume merging activities in the afternoon.

The 7.3 kernel release set records in several areas, with 18,765 non-merge commits contributed by 3,021 developers, 807 of whom were new to kernel development. Key enhancements in this release include binfmt_misc extensions, group-scheduling improvements for large systems, the failfs filesystem, fchroot() system call, global per-CPU data for BPF programs, new sched_ext subscheduler feature, working-set tracking for virtual machines, alternative data-stream support for ntfs3 filesystem, and numerous SMB server improvements. For comprehensive details, refer to LWN merge-window summaries and KernelNewbies' 7.3 page.