Linux Kernel: Late-Cycle Merge Wave Tightens Up 7.3
Linus pulled a dense batch of late-stage fixes across NFS, thermal, ACPI, clocks, AppArmor, and power management for the 7.3 cycle, with a heavy emphasis on use-after-free and race-condition fixes rather than new features.
Duration: PT2M39S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Linux Kernel.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Linux Kernel
- Published: 2026-08-27T13:18:58Z
- Audio duration: PT2M39S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Good day, and welcome to Linux Kernel briefing for August 27th, 2026.
The dominant story today is stabilization. Across nearly every subsystem pulled in this batch, the real work was closing races and memory-safety gaps ahead of 7.3, not adding new capability.
Start with NFS, commit 73e3f07. Trond Myklebust's pull carries a long list of use-after-free fixes in the sunrpc client, a delegation hash table leak, a NULL dereference on lock-owner allocation failure, and a TLS handshake completion race. That's a lot of concurrency bugs landing at once, which suggests the NFS…
AppArmor tells a similar story. John Johansen's pull, commit 8fefe68, highlights Jann Horn's fix for a credential use-after-free tied to how AppArmor updates stale credentials after a policy replacement — now deferred to task work at the end of the syscall. The same pull also fixes a race condition in label…
ACPI picked up smaller but concrete fixes: a stack buffer overflow in the platform firmware runtime update driver's query-capability path, and the battery driver now protects all its properties with a dedicated mutex to stop parallel evaluation of the battery status method, per commit ea10c0b.
On the power side,…
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