On 18 October 2026, Linus Torvalds released Linux 7.3, a record kernel with 18,765 commits from 3,021 developers — 807 of them first-time contributors — plus new work across filesystems, the scheduler, and BPF. Before you update production servers, read what actually changed and what can wait for 7.4.

On August 30, 2026, Linus Torvalds released the first 7.3 candidate, with roughly a third of the diff coming from AMD GPU register definitions alone. Linux gamers and AMD users can test Zen 6 enablement early; Nvidia owners on the open-source driver should sit the release candidates out.