Linux 7.3-rc4 Released: More Fixes Caught By LLMs, But Nothing Too Scary

Linus Torvalds announced the release today of Linux 7.3-rc4. As usual for recent months, the fixes continue to be quite heavy and scattered all over the place driven in large part by AI/LLMs spotting various code defects. Overall though Linus Torvalds isn't too worried about Linux 7.3-rc4. Merged this week for Linux 7.3-rc4 were some important x86/x86_64 fixes, adding support for several new game controllers to the XPad driver, addressing two notable bugs with Btrfs, and addressing a silent user-space data loss bug that's existed since 2023. Linus Torvalds wrote in the Linux 7.3-rc4 announcement: "We all know the drill by now: "it's big, yadda yadda". What I do find a bit interesting is that filesystems continue to be quite a noticeable part of the whole "it's bigger than usual". This time around it's smb and ntfs, so it's not like it's one particular filesystem, it's just been that filesystems in general seem to have been getting more attention recently. Of course, driver changes are still the biggest part, but not as dominatingly as they sometimes are. The patch overall seems to be about a third drivers, a third filesystems and networking, and a third "misc" (architecture fixes and tooling). But it's mostly pretty small patches. I think the biggest single patch in here is a removal of a file that was moved from lib/ to mm/ during the merge window, but for some reason the the old copy stayed around and got this belated removal patch. You can see the shortlog below for details, but nothing strikes me as _particularly_ interesting. There's a lot of error path cleanup stuff, which various LLM's seem to be pretty good at catching, but that typically isn't going to be all that noticeable in normal use. But hey, if any of the issues hit *you*, you are going to care." Linux 7.3 will be out in October and delivering many exciting changes.