Linus Torvalds released Linux 7.3-rc5 on September 27 with a familiar summary: “Another week, another large rc.” Underneath, he said, it is “the same old, same old.”

The numbers

rc5 contains 577 commits from 275 contributors. The long tail is long: 184 of those people, about two thirds, sent exactly one commit, and only 53 sent three or more.

The top individual contributors were:

Contributor	Commits	Area
Darrick J. Wong	22	XFS online scrub and repair
Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi	16	BPF
Fuad Tabba	14	KVM on arm64 (pKVM)
Wentao Liang	13	GPIO, DRM, SCSI, mlx5

An unusual diffstat

Normally drivers dominate a release candidate, often making up more than half the change. In rc5 they are less than a third, and selftests account for roughly a quarter. Tests are the least risky thing a release candidate can grow, so a large rc padded with tests is a much better sign than a large rc padded with core changes.

By area, the fixes break down roughly as:

• Networking, about 76 commits: mlx5e, bcmgenet, stmmac, IPv6, SCTP, UDP, TIPC, and NFC hardening
• Architecture and KVM, about 60: arm64, s390, RISC-V, and x86 SEV and PMU
• Graphics, about 58: nouveau, amdgpu, i915, xe, and virtio-gpu
• Core filesystems and memory management, about 50: XFS, VFS, cgroups, hugetlb, and DAMON
• BPF, 34 direct commits plus around 19 selftest commits

Roughly 100 commits fix memory safety problems of some kind: use-after-free, out-of-bounds access, information leaks, races, and NULL dereferences. That continues the theme of this cycle, where automated and LLM-assisted analysis keeps finding error-path bugs.

The networking hardening is also timely. The week before, four long-lived networking bugs got public root exploits, including one in SCTP.

Filesystems quieter, XFS busy

After rc3’s XFS and SMB fixes and rc4’s SMB and NTFS work, filesystems calmed down in rc5 with one exception: Darrick Wong’s 22 commits to XFS online scrub and repair make him the single largest contributor. Online repair lets XFS fix some metadata damage while mounted, which is exactly the kind of feature that needs a pile of fixes before people trust it.

Timing

Torvalds said nothing looks particularly alarming going into rc6, which is expected around October 4. On a normal seven-candidate cycle, Linux 7.3 final lands in mid-October, which lines up with Ubuntu 26.10 shipping 7.3 as its kernel.

# see how big rc5 was yourself
git log --oneline v7.3-rc4..v7.3-rc5 | wc -l
git diff --stat v7.3-rc4..v7.3-rc5 | tail -1

As with every rc, test it on a machine you can afford to lose, and report regressions with the evidence our kernel panic guide describes.