Linux 7.3 Features Many Exciting Improvements, New Hardware Support & Faster Btrfs

With Linux 7.3-rc1 released to cap off the two week merge window, here is a look at the many exciting changes merged for the Linux 7.3 kernel that is working its way toward release in the second half of October. Among the many changes in Linux 7.3 are introducing the new Ryzen AI Halo LED/RGB driver, AMD Zen 6 enablement continues especially on the Ryzen client side, KSMBD compatibility with Apple Time Machine backups, Lenovo ThinkPad USB-C Security feature is now supported by its ACPI driver, initial kernel driver support for the 2026 Steam Controller, Intel Xe3P Nova Lake integrated graphics are now considered stable / enabled-by-default, merging FailFS, and better gaming performance for systems with limited amounts of vRAM. Plus a lot more as disclosed in the rest of the article. On the performance side are many nice optimizations in different areas. My Linux 7.3 kernel testing remains ongoing while so far have seen very nice Btrfs performance improvements on Linux 7.3 compared to Linux 7.2 and prior. More Linux 7.3 kernel benchmarking is ongoing at Phoronix. As noted by Linus Torvalds in the Linux 7.3-rc1 release announcement and the trend of the past number of kernels, this kernel version is on the heavier side in part due to the increased patch churn of AI/LLM coding agents both in uncovering countless kernel bugs and also assisting in the creation of new Linux kernel patches. The Linux 7.3 kernel source tree right now is just shy of 41 million lines. There has also been continued code removal of obsolete, unmaintained drivers from the Linux 7.3 kernel as a result of continued noise from the AI/LLM activity. Processors + Memory: - Identifying the new AMD low-power CPU core type as well as more unified Intel/AMD CPU core type handling. - An SMP improvement to help reduce latency and better real-time performance. - A variety of Intel and AMD power management improvements like Intel directed package-level thermal interrupts. - A minor optimization for old AMD Athlon XP era systems that have SSE but not SSE2. - The AMD platform drivers have been preparing for next-gen Zen 6 platforms. - The AMD k10temp driver adds EPYC Zen 5 per-CCD temperature monitoring. - x86/mm improvements to greatly improve the performance of latency-sensitive workloads. - Two very exciting memory management optimizations. - Initial preparations for Intel Starfire as that Panther Lake derived SoC for extreme environments. - Support for several newer RISC-V extensions. - Qualcomm Shikra SoC support has begun appearing in mainline. - Initial support for Apple M3 Pro / Max / Ultra support but not yet GPU support or other key functionality needed for day-to-day usage. - A power optimization for M1 Pro / Max / Ultra SoCs. - Other new ARM and RISC-V hardware support. - Linux scheduler improvements that can help with hybrid CPUs. - Scheduler work that can help improve gaming performance on dated computer hardware. - Initial enablement for IBM Power12 has begun and Linux 7.3 PowerPC begins supporting in-kernel Rust code. - The ARM64 BBML3 feature is now supported by the mainline kernel. Graphics: - Improvements to Linux graphics/gaming performance for systems with little vRAM (especially ~8GB vRAM) configurations. - DRM format modifier support for old AMD GPUs as another enhancement courtesy of Valve's Linux graphics team. - Also for older AMD GPU hardware is improved GPU reset recovery. - Various new AMD GPU graphics IP support like the DCN 6.0 display block. - Nouveau now has NVDEC interface support needed by NVK for supporting Vulkan Video acceleration with Mesa 26.3. - Various other graphics/display driver improvements. - Over on the FBDEV side for the old frame-buffer device drivers is improvements for vintage Atari computers and Voodoo 3 / 4 / 5 graphics cards. Linux Storage / File-Systems: - Btrfs performance improvements that I have also shown in some of my early testing of Linux 7.3. - Addressing a bottleneck for small I/O on PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs. - RWF_DONTCACHE support for block devices as a win for those running database servers directly off raw devices or other user-space applications that interact with raw block devices. - Multi-device flushes in parallel for F2FS. - UBI now supports per-device wear-leveling thresholds compared to the prior default of just one wear-leveling threshold for the entire system even with multiple NAND flashes. - Various NFS improvements. - The in-kernel SMB server KSMBD now supports interoperability for Apple TIme Machine back-ups. - Performance improvements for FUSE via IO_uring buffer pools and zero-copy handling. - The modern NTFS driver now offers read support for Windows System Compression WOF. - Many fixes to the Device Mapper code includign some code clean=ups via Claude Opus. - Improvements to the RAID 5/6 benchmark-based algorithm selection. - Security fixes to eCryptfs with some of them dating all the way back to its kernel introduction in 2006. - Fixes for the Apple HFS and HFS+ drivers. - FSCRYPT improvements including work that will help Btrfs encryption adoption. - IOmap improvements that can help the likes of EXT4 and XFS performance. - Correcting the faulty behavior of filenames too long on the FAT file-system driver. - XFS adds FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES support as an efficiency improvement for modern drivers. - The FailFS driver was merged as complementary to the NULLFS driver merged last cycle.