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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteThe “slightly strange diffstat” description applies to Linux 7.3-rc5, not to rc7. In his rc5 announcement, Linus Torvalds said selftests accounted for a quarter of the patch and drivers for less than a third. He later described rc6 as having about half its diff in driver fixes. The available release-specific statements do not establish that rc7 had half its code in selftests.
Where the selftest figure comes from
In the Linux 7.3-rc5 announcement, Torvalds said less than a third of the patch was drivers, while a quarter was selftests. He called the distribution unusual, adding: “Not bad unusual, just not what I typically see.”
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Those proportions describe rc5’s diffstat categories, as Torvalds characterized them. They should not be reassigned to another candidate. The Linux Kernel Archives listed 7.3-rc7 as the current mainline candidate on October 12, 2026, but that listing does not give an rc7 selftest percentage.
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Why a diffstat can make tests look unusually large
A diffstat summarizes changed files and lines, not the number of submitted patches or commits. A few large changes can therefore account for a substantial share of the total even when other categories contain many smaller changes.
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Torvalds noted that most driver patches in rc5 were small, while some selftest changes were much larger. He identified the largest patch as an arm64 KVM ITS table test. The result is a test-heavy share of changed code, not evidence by itself that tests dominated the number of changes or the development effort.
How rc6 differed
In the Linux 7.3-rc6 announcement, Torvalds said the diffstat had returned to its normal pattern, with about half of the diff in driver fixes. He also listed KVM-heavy architecture updates, core networking work, SMB client filesystem changes, BPF, and new selftests.
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The sequence matters: the quarter-of-the-diff selftest figure belongs to rc5; the roughly-half figure in rc6 refers to driver fixes. Neither statement establishes the selftest share in rc7.
What can be said about rc7
The archive’s mainline listing establishes that 7.3-rc7 was available as a release candidate on October 12, 2026. October mailing-list activity also included an MM hotfix pull request dated October 8, but that is not a measurement of rc7’s diffstat. No rc7 announcement or selftest-share figure in the cited release-specific material confirms the claim that half its code was tests.
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