On September 13, Linus Torvalds issued the third release candidate for the 7.3 series of the Linux kernel, describing it as “another fairly large rc release” and citing a major contribution to the filesystem as the reason, as stated in his announcement.
This version includes changes to the XFS filesystem, security and correctness fixes for the SMB client, and once again a further set of patches generated by AI which the maintainers have to go through by hand. The schedule for the stable release of Linux 7.3 is still set for the second half of October 2026, with about four more weekly candidates to come.
Release candidates do not end up in the stable distributions by themselves; instead, testers can obtain the build from the Official Linux Kernel Archives or from Torvalds’ Git tree.
Linux 7.3-rc3 XFS Updates and SMB Security Fixes
Torvalds pointed out that XFS was the main source of the extra filesystem weight this cycle, since the filesystem had in one go received lock annotations, improvements to health monitoring, changes to quota handling, support for zoned writes, work on directory-entry salvage, updates to the scrub-and-repair functions, and the addition of media-verification routines.
People who administer XFS on a large scale will be most directly aware of the improvements to the health-monitoring and scrub functions, since these tools identify and repair data integrity problems before they spread.
The security and correctness issues addressed by the SMB client—the program that allows Linux systems to connect to Windows file shares and network-attached storage—included a remedy for a heap overflow that could occur during DACL rewriting, logic for rejecting oversized DACLs, and validation checks for malformed read responses.
When organisations and small businesses set up Windows shares or NAS appliances using SMB, they should give priority to the heap-overflow fix once Linux 7.3 is available in their distribution’s repositories, since a heap overflow in the DACL rewriting that has not been patched could be exploited in some network configurations.
Linux 7.3-rc3 Driver Fixes, AI Patches, and Availability
Even though there was additional weight added by the filesystem, the drivers still formed the majority of the patch, mainly in the areas of sound and networking. Torvalds stated that “the bulk of the rc3 patch is still on the driver side”, with the GPU driver updates appearing in smaller numbers this week.
For the S390 and PowerPC systems, specific fixes have been implemented. Scattered corrections have been included in the main kernel and the networking stack, and Landlock, the kernel’s sandboxing feature, has received a remedy for a use-after-free vulnerability together with increased tracing coverage.
The LZ4 rolling decompression feature of EROFS, the kernel’s read-only filesystem format, was temporarily disabled after the developers had identified a data-corruption risk which they have not yet been able to resolve. This disablement means that EROFS workloads which depend on the feature are limited until the fundamental problem is properly fixed.
When the Linux 7.3 merge window began, kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman predicted that the cycle would be difficult due to the increasing number of bug reports and patches being produced by large language models, something that the maintainers have to go through by hand. This trend persisted into rc3, and this week’s build includes another set of fixes generated by AI on top of the earlier ones.
Linux 7.3 is still scheduled for a stable release in the second half of October 2026, there being about four more weekly release candidates to come before that time. rc3 can now be obtained from the Official Linux Kernel Archives or from Torvalds’ Git tree for testing purposes.
The corrections included in rc3 are the ones that will be included when Linux 7.3 is available in various distributions’ repositories, and the temporarily disabled EROFS LZ4 feature will still remain off until the developers have addressed the corruption risk.
