- Sources: primary, discussion
- Summary: Corbet's summary of the rest of the 7.3 merge window records 15,267 non-merge changesets in 7.3-rc1 from 2,450 developers, 520 of them first-time contributors, with about 13,000 landing after the first merge-window summary. The count is second only to 6.7-rc1. Changes with operational consequences include the completion of the sched_ext sub-scheduler feature, which lets a root BPF scheduler hand a cgroup subtree to a nested sub-scheduler with revocable CPU grants, the outright removal of Btrfs version 1 free-space cache support after deprecation since 6.11 and of the
usebackuproot mount option, a new crypto/af_alg_restrict sysctl that partly restricts user-space access to the AF_ALG API by default, LANDLOCK_RESTRICT_SELF_NO_NEW_PRIVS for landlock_restrict_self(), and RWF_DONTCACHE for buffered I/O to block devices. Rust support adds I/O types and projection, the fwctl API and SRCU, BPF gains KF_SPINLOCK_SAFE kfuncs, arena pointer parameters and per-CPU global data, 1,264 commits carry Assisted-by tags at just over 8 percent of the total, which Corbet states is likely an undercount of LLM-assisted commits, and 153 exported symbols were removed against 523 added. - Why it matters: The two removals and the new AF_ALG default are behaviour changes that reach machines engineers already run, rather than opt-in features.
- Follow-up: Track the 7.3 release, which Corbet places most likely on 2026-10-18, and whether the AF_ALG restriction breaks user-space crypto consumers.
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