Abstract:
Linux kernel development ushered in new and important progress.
The third release candidate (RC) of Linux 7.3 has been officially released. According to the current development pace, this version is moving towards a stable version expected to be launched in late October.
From the perspective of the entire development cycle, Linux 7.3 continues to maintain a high level of activity. As early as the early days of development, Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had expected that this would be a very busy version cycle, and the current development situation also confirms this judgment. During the development process this week, the community introduced a large number of fixes, many of which were discovered and solved after analysis assisted by artificial intelligence and large language models.
One of the hot fixes in this round of updates involves the read-only file system EROFS. Due to the potential risk of data corruption, the developers decided to temporarily disable their LZ4 Rolling Decompression feature. Related issues are expected to take longer to be completely resolved, so a more cautious approach has been taken.
Linux founder Linus Torvalds said in the Linux 7.3-rc3 release announcement that this is another relatively large candidate version, and the proportion of file system-related changes is higher than usual. This file system repair mainly focuses on XFS and SMB clients, and also includes updates to multiple file systems and related modules such as NetFS, AFS, EROFS, and Btrfs.
However, Torvalds also emphasized that although the changes in the file system are more conspicuous, it does not mean that the focus of the update of this candidate version will completely shift to the file system. In fact, most patches still come from the driver world. The most important driver updates this week focus on audio and network device drivers. There are also some improvements to the GPU graphics driver, but the scale is relatively small. In addition, scattered fixes from other subsystems are being incorporated.
In addition to the driver and file system, this release also covers a number of core kernel and network stack fixes, and the security sandbox mechanism Landlock has received several improvements and self-test updates. In terms of hardware architecture support, correction patches for s390 and PowerPC platforms have also been introduced to further improve stability and compatibility.
Overall, the Linux 7.3 development cycle still maintains a relatively fast pace. With the release of the third release candidate, the development team will continue to work on stability, reliability, and hardware support to prepare for the final stage of the official release, which is expected to be launched in late October.
Learn more:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wgYVzcwHBPTjpe4Sh7Jd8iXJZthzqHNrwevdci5d7ChiA@mail.gmail.com/T/#u
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