Linux 7.3 Released: Zen 6 Ready, Memory Latency Slashed, Low-VRAM Gaming Improved

Linux kernel 7.3 was released on October 18 as the next stable version, arriving on schedule. Linus Torvalds noted a quiet final week and opened the 7.4 merge window, though his merge activity will be irregular due to a family vacation.

AMD Platform Enhancements

HSMP driver protocol v7 adds support for Zen 6 Family 1Ah Model 80H processors, which are slated for a January 2027 launch.

PMF driver now supports the same Zen 6 series and exposes a new ioctl interface for device metrics. amd_halo_led driver enables LED control on Ryzen AI Halo mini PCs directly from the kernel; previously this required AMD's Debian-based Ryzen AI developer platform. amd-pstate gains an optional dynamic EPP (Energy Performance Preference) mode. The kernel can now adjust performance preference per CPU core by selecting "dynamic" in the governor, whereas before it could only be set system-wide.

Radeon GPU Improvements

Valve engineer Timur Kristóf rewrote the GPU reset mechanism for older Radeon cards. The new reset targets only the GFX module (the graphics workload portion) without disturbing video memory, improving recovery after a GPU hang.

Another Valve engineer, Natalie Vock, contributed the first patches to improve gaming performance on GPUs with limited VRAM. When video memory fills, the kernel can evict less critical data to system RAM, freeing space for game assets. For example, the patched Indiana Jones and the Great Circle requires 9 GB on an 8 GB GPU to run smoothly; the full patch set is already shipping on SteamOS with the remaining parts upstreamed.

Memory Management Latency Fixes

KSM (Kernel Samepage Merging) : ZTE engineers discovered that KSM lookup operations could lock memory for hundreds of milliseconds under memory pressure, causing application freezes. Their fix reduces the worst-case latency in stress tests from 705 ms to under 2 ms .

zsmalloc (used by zRAM and Zswap for compressed memory): Xiaomi's Hao Wenshuo resolved a similar locking slowdown. Benchmarks show up to 1.83× speedup on Raspberry Pi 4B and 1.4× on a 20-core Intel system .

Other Notable Changes

RISC-V gains support for 11 new ISA extensions and switches to UEFI runtime services for reboot and power-off.

Preliminary support for booting Linux on Apple M3 Pro, Max, and Ultra chips.

Intel's aerospace-grade Starfire chip (based on Panther Lake) receives its first Linux update. logitech-hidpp driver adds HID++ 2.0 button remapping for new enthusiast mice and keyboards. hid-steam driver now supports the 2026 Steam Controller.

Lenovo ThinkPad users can now use the USB-C restricted mode security feature on Linux.

Upgrade Paths

The most direct route to Linux 7.3 is Ubuntu 26.10 (the interim release). Fedora Workstation, Arch Linux, and its derivatives will follow. Installing the mainline kernel on Ubuntu is possible but carries a risk of data loss; backing up is essential. The official source remains

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/

.

Because 7.3 shipped on time, Linux 7.4 is likely before year-end. That may make 7.4 the 2025 LTS release, or Greg Kroah-Hartman could designate 7.3 as the 2026 LTS instead.