Linux 7.3 is still in its merge window, but enough has landed to get a clear picture of what this release is about. The short version: it’s a unusually performance-focused cycle, with meaningful gains across storage, scheduling, memory management, and networking—plus a wide sweep of new hardware support and some long-overdue security fixes.

Scheduler and latency improvements

The most immediately noticeable change for desktop users may be Peter Zijlstra’s cgroup scheduling overhaul. The patch flattens cgroup CPU scheduling into a single runqueue and adds new weight distribution modes (up, max, concur, tasks). On an aging Intel Core i7-2600K paired with an AMD Radeon RX 580, minimum framerates in Shadows Awakening jumped from 4 to 29 FPS—roughly 7x—with average FPS rising and frame latency dropping sharply. This won’t reach stable for at least a couple of months since Linux 7.2 just shipped.

Separately, Bytedance engineer Chuyi Zhou’s SMP work reduces preemption-disabled time during IPI completion waits. On a 16-core production machine, P99 max preemption-disabled time dropped from spikes of up to 16-17ms down to around 1.5ms. DPDK users in particular should notice this. Intel’s Dave Hansen flagged it as worth watching for regressions.

Vincent Guittot’s work also lowers scheduling latency for short-slice tasks, with measurable cyclictest improvements. Intel hybrid CPU scheduling gets fixes for Alder Lake, Lunar Lake, and Panther Lake cluster scheduling, and NOHZ load balancing now prefers fully idle cores.

Sched_ext’s sub-scheduler support reaches feature completeness in 7.3, letting a root BPF scheduler hand off a cgroup subtree to a nested sub-scheduler with revocable CPU grants. The sub-scheduler fully owns scheduling decisions for its tasks—enqueueing, preemption, CPU frequency control. There are also fixes for cgroup migration bugs that caused use-after-free issues and race conditions that could hard-hang machines.

Storage and filesystem gains

Btrfs direct I/O now reaches about 95% of theoretical throughput via an IOmap bounce buffer. Logging and fsync fixes yield roughly 5x gains in some workloads, and the free-space cache defaults to v2.

EXT4 gains parallel direct I/O writes and a faster multi-block allocator. A reworked IOmap layer pushes NVMe IOPS from 1.92 million to 2.19 million in testing.

FUSE gets a new io_uring buffer pool and zero-copy support, authored by Joanne Koong. Previously each FUSE io_uring entry needed its own dedicated payload buffer sized to the maximum possible payload. The buffer pool lets the kernel share a contiguous memory pool across requests. Zero-copy (requiring CAP_SYS_ADMIN) lets the server access client pages or page cache folios directly. Benchmarks show significant gains. Early groundwork for large folio support is also in, though not complete.

FSCRYPT gets a significant cleanup from Eric Biggers at Google. Redundant per-filesystem file content encryption implementations in EXT4 and F2FS are removed in favor of the shared blk-crypto implementation, which also enables inline encryption hardware. Direct I/O now works on encrypted files without the inlinecrypt mount option. This paves the way for Btrfs encryption support down the road.

The modern NTFS driver gains optional read support for Windows System Compression (WOF)—XPRESS 4K/8K/16K and LZX 32K—via a new CONFIG_NTFS_FS_WOF_COMPRESSION Kconfig option. Write support isn’t included. The Paragon NTFS3 driver gets mostly bug fixes plus basic alternative data stream support.

RAID 5/6 algorithm selection gets more realistic benchmarking: a 4+1 disk load calculation replaces the previous approach, and throughput is now reported on data disks rather than just the parity disk. New KUnit benchmark coverage is added for XOR and RAID6 code paths.

Linux 7.3 also merges NVDIMM and DAX changes preparing for eventual upstreaming of FAMFS, Micron’s file system for fabric-attached memory in CXL servers targeting byte-level access to 100TB+ disaggregated memory pools. The file system itself hasn’t been submitted yet—it’s on its 13th patch revision.

Memory management

KSM lock stalls drop from around 700ms to under 2ms. Zsmalloc gets speed improvements for zRAM and Zswap workloads, with Raspberry Pi 4B seeing up to 1.83x gains in some tests.

CPU and platform support

A new AMD AMD_CPU_TYPE_LOW_POWER core type lands, expected to appear in some Zen 6 client chips. Intel and AMD CPU core type handling is unified into generic core types, resolving confusion from differing vendor-specific numbering.

Other CPU changes: an SSE-based write memory barrier optimization for old AMD Athlon XP systems, a KCFI optimization for older Intel CPUs, and MSR code moving from 32-bit to 64-bit interfaces. The 32-bit MSR interfaces are slated for removal in Linux 7.4.

The AMD k10temp driver now supports per-CCD temperature monitoring on 5th Gen EPYC Turin (Zen 5) server processors. This worked on Ryzen client chips but failed on EPYC 9005 due to its larger CCD count—fixed with an expanded model range check and corrected CCD offset.

A Fedora Workstation 44 performance regression on the Framework Laptop 13 Pro with Intel Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) has been fixed. The bug was in the Intel P-State driver’s handling of the performance governor when using Tuned-PPD. The fix is merged into 7.3 and being backported to stable branches.

Graphics

AMDGPU gains DCN 6.0 display core support, a second graphics pipe on modern APUs, and 8K display fixes. Valve’s Natalie Vock contributed DMEMCG eviction work to improve gaming performance when exceeding vRAM capacity on both AMDGPU and Intel. Valve’s Timur Kristóf added DRM format modifier support for GFX6-GFX8 era AMD GPUs and improved GPU reset recovery for older hardware.

Intel Xe3P (Nova Lake) graphics are now stable and enabled by default—no more force-probe flag required. DisplayPort 2.1 ALPM support for Nova Lake is still not merged despite patches circulating for nearly a year; the fifth revision was posted to the intel-gfx list without a changelog.

The Rust-based Nova NVIDIA driver gets Blackwell/Hopper fixes and GSP boot improvements including vGPU support. Nouveau adds NVDEC support, enabling NVK Vulkan Video.

Networking

Over 1,280 combined net and net-next patches landed. Maintainer Jakub Kicinski noted that a third to half of net-next patches appear to be AI-driven low-priority fixes and cleanups, leaving maintainers overwhelmed. Meta has provided LLM budget to run multi-model reviews on patches to catch hallucinations, and maintainers plan to shift more routine work—patchwork management, commit message editing, applying already-reviewed patches—to LLMs.

On the technical side: BIG TCP support for UDP tunnels in VXLAN/Geneve, improved MPTCP handling under memory pressure, initial CXL support for AMD/Solarflare NICs (the SFC_CXL Kconfig option for the SFC9100 family), a new Intel iXD driver skeleton, AMD Pensando NIC firmware flashing, and new WiFi drivers including NXPWIFI and Morse Micro’s mm81x.

CXL Type-2 accelerator driver support in the CXL core subsystem is now complete, with unit testing added to catch regressions.

KSMBD and SMB

KSMBD gains opt-in support for Apple Time Machine backups over SMB, requiring reverse-engineering of undocumented Apple ‘AAPL’ SMB2 extensions (Finder, stream, COPYCHUNK, sparse-file, CHANGE_NOTIFY, RPC compatibility), authored by Gael Blivet. Also added: SMB2 command sequence window support, SMB3 request replay support, per-share SMB3 encryption, and SMB Direct RDMA encryption. 33 SMB client fixes also landed, now maintained by Paulo Alcantara following Steve French’s passing.

Security and crypto

eCryptfs gets a batch of security hardening fixes addressing maliciously crafted metadata in lower encrypted files and miscdev communication between kernel and user-space. Some bugs trace back to eCryptfs’ original 2006 mainline commit. At least some were reportedly found with AI tooling.

New library APIs for AES encryption modes (ECB, CBC, CBC-CTS, CTR, XCTR, XTS, GCM, CCM) land from Eric Biggers at Google. These replace the harder-to-use crypto_skcipher and crypto_aead APIs and are wired into the traditional crypto API for self-testing. This is groundwork for migrating architecture-optimized AES code into the library in future cycles.

AF_ALG gets a new af_alg_restrict sysctl following its deprecation in Linux 7.2. By default, only algorithms needed by IWD, BlueZ, and cryptsetup remain accessible. The Qualcomm QCE driver is marked broken in the same pull.

Stack randomization code is consolidated from architecture-specific implementations (PowerPC, LoongArch, RISC-V, s390, x86/x86_64) into generic entry code, ensuring randomization happens as early as possible. A new CONFIG_SYSCALL_USER_DISPATCH Kconfig option and kernel.syscall_user_dispatch runtime control make Syscall User Dispatch more configurable.

Linux 7.3 also introduces a 120-second timeout for EFI runtime service calls. Previously a stuck EFI call would hold efi_runtime_lock forever, wedging efivarfs and NVRAM writes until reboot. The fix came from Breno Leitao at Meta after hitting the issue on an NVIDIA Grace server.

Hardware support

Audio: AMD ACP7.B/F Sound Open Firmware support for next-gen Ryzen laptops, Cirrus Logic CS35L62, Loongson 2K0300, Meson GX, several Qualcomm audio platforms (LPI MI2S, SM8475, WSA855X), new Realtek codecs (RT1321 VA1/2, RT766/7), AW88399 HD-audio for newer Lenovo Legion laptops, Hygon and Lisuan HDMI controller support, and codec quirks for ASUS, Lenovo, and Acer laptops. USB audio adds the Pioneer DJ DJM-S11 professional mixer.

Input/HID: Initial kernel driver support for the 2026 Valve Steam Controller, extending the existing hid-steam driver. Also: HID-HyperX driver for QuadCast 2 microphone mute status, MSI Claw Gamepad driver, HID++ 2.0 reprogrammable button support for Logitech devices, and AMD Sensor Fusion Hub tablet-mode switch support.

Media: Intel Computer Vision Sensing driver extended to Nova Lake. Milos VPU 2.0 support in the Qualcomm Iris decode driver, Dreamchip RPPX1 ISP framework support, VSP1 driver additions for Renesas RZ/T2H and RZ/N2H, and new sensor support for Sony IMX678, IMX471m, and Himax HM1092 IR sensors.

PCI: Advisory Non-Fatal Errors per the PCIe 7.0 spec, new Intel device IDs for Nova Lake and Dunlow (entry-level Xeon), NVIDIA Vera Rubin added to peer-to-peer DMA support, D3 power management for hotplug-capable root ports on non-x86 platforms, and L0s disabled for the Realtek RTS525A card reader to prevent AER interrupt storms.

Legacy hardware: The TDFXFB driver can now initialize Voodoo 3/4/5 cards without a PC BIOS, useful on non-x86 systems like Amiga with a PCI bridge. The ATAFB driver for Atari computers adds 8-bit chunky, 16-bit RGB565, and ARGB888 video modes plus SuperVidel SuperBlitter support.

Apple HFS/HFS+: Maintenance continues despite Apple abandoning HFS in 2009 and HFS+ in 2017. This cycle brings Syzbot-uncovered bug fixes, xfstest failure fixes, a b-tree bitmap corruption check, and KUnit test cleanup.

RISC-V

Linux 7.3 adds support for several newer RISC-V ISA extensions: Smcsrind/Sscsrind for indirect CSR access, Smcntrpmf for privilege mode filtering, Ssccfg and Smcdeleg for supervisor counter configuration and delegation, several Zicc memory-ordering extensions (Zicclsm, Ziccamoa, Ziccif, Ziccrse), Za64rs for LR/SC reservation set guarantees, and Ssqosid for QoS identifiers used in memory and cache bandwidth monitoring. Shadow Stack control flow integrity handling also improves.

Other changes

Device Mapper gets mostly fixes this cycle, including six code cleanups identified by Claude Opus 4.6 alongside manual work across dm-core, dm-cache, dm-switch, dm-inlinecrypt, and dm-vdo.
CONFIG_COMPAT_32BIT_TIME gaps are closed across ARM, PowerPC, MIPS, SPARC, and x86 so the option is properly respected when disabled.
HWMON adds support for several ASUS motherboards, ROG Ryujin III and NZXT Kraken 2024 Elite AIO coolers, more Lenovo Yogafan models, and new drivers for PolarFire SoC and RISC-V Eswin EIC7700 PVT sensors.

When to expect it

Linux 7.3 is expected to reach stable release around October 2025. Linux 7.4 is the likely candidate for this year’s Long Term Support kernel. Early benchmarks on a 48-core Intel Xeon 678X Granite Rapids workstation show a mix of gains and regressions—not unusual for a kernel still in its merge window.