Linux Kernel: Merge Window Brings Use-After-Free Fixes Across the Board
Linus pulled nine subsystem trees ahead of the 7.3 merge window, and a clear pattern emerged: lifetime and use-after-free bugs were fixed across power supply, RDMA, SCSI, and module code, alongside a major Landlock observability upgrade and a sprawling DRM pull.
Duration: PT2M42S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Linux Kernel.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Linux Kernel
- Published: 2026-08-22T13:13:33Z
- Audio duration: PT2M42S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Good day. It's August 22nd, 2026, and the merge window for Linux 7.3 is in full swing.
The signal across today's pulls is memory lifetime discipline. Use-after-free fixes showed up again and again in unrelated subsystems. The power supply tree, commit 2be02a7, fixed use-after-free bugs on driver removal in half a dozen chargers - ucs1002, lp8788, ab8500, bq24257, and qcom battmgr among them. RDMA, in…
Second theme: observability and hardening in security-adjacent code. Landlock, in commit 7199989, added a full set of tracepoints for domain enforcement, rule checking, and ptrace or network denials, plus a new flag, LANDLOCK_RESTRICT_SELF_NO_NEW_PRIVS, for more consistent process-wide enforcement. EncryptFS, in…
Smaller but notable: SCSI added a brand-new driver, leapraid, and continued a long-running refactor of error handling in the SD driver. MMC and MIPS both leaned into modernizing hardware description - device tree bindings and software nodes replacing legacy board files. And the DRM pull, commit 4e69c18, was enormous…
What's next: expect continued fallout-fixing as these trees settle, particularly around the RDMA and power-supply removal paths. If you maintain a driver's remove…
T…
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