Linus Torvalds has released the 7.3 kernel, as expected. The release arrived on schedule on Sunday afternoon, and with it the merge window for 7.4 opens the following day.
Torvalds noted that little notable happened in the final week of development, so the release followed its planned path. He added that he is on his annual family vacation, so his merging work for 7.4 will be delayed. He plans to spend most of the next morning on a boat and underwater, returning to merging in the afternoon, and he expects his schedule to be unusual for a while.
The 7.3 release is a record-breaker on all fronts. It brought in 18,765 non-merge commits from 3,021 developers, and 807 of them were first-time kernel developers.
Significant changes include extensions to binfmt_misc, group-scheduling work aimed at improving performance on large systems, and the new failfs filesystem that fails all operations. The release also adds the fchroot() system call, global per-CPU data for BPF programs, and completion of the sched_ext subscheduler feature. Other additions include working-set tracking for virtual machines, alternate data-stream support in the ntfs3 filesystem, and a long list of SMB server improvements.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing