On September 24, 2026, Greg Kroah-Hartman merged into driver-core-next a new taint flag, TAINT_FORCED_BIND, that marks kernels whose sysfs bind/unbind files have been written. It targets fuzzing bots like syzbot that arbitrarily bind drivers to devices and drown maintainers in pointless bug reports.

On September 13, 2026 Linus Torvalds released Linux 7.3-rc3, another fairly large rc driven by XFS and the SMB client, against the backdrop of Greg Kroah-Hartman’s warning that AI-generated patches are overwhelming maintainers. Follow the Assisted-by policy and take stock of what the AI wave changes for kernel contributors.