// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Linux Kernel 7.3 Release is Good News For Gamers Short on VRAM
A new kernel release is here about two months after Linux 7.2, and its biggest draw is performance.
Filesystem speedups, scheduler work for gaming, and lower latency for real-time workloads lead the way, with hardware support and a few other smaller changes topping it off.
Of course no new kernel release, even a point release, is complete without a word from Linus Torvalds:
If you are wondering about "under water", that's probably Torvalds referring to scuba diving, one of his rare non-nerdy passions.
AMD's HSMP driver now supports protocol v7, which Zen 6 Family 1Ah Model 80H processors rely on. The CPU manufacturer has been busy laying the groundwork for those chips that are set for a January 2027 launch.
The PMF driver also picks up support for the same family and adds a new ioctl interface that delivers device metrics.
Not everything is Zen 6 groundwork, though. Ryzen AI Halo mini PC owners can now control the lighting of their device when using the kernel through the new amd_halo_led driver.
Before this, toggling the LEDs only used to work via AMD's Debian-based distro for the device, the Ryzen AI Developer Platform.
If you like tinkering with CPU power behavior, the amd-pstate driver has a change for you.
The opt-in Dynamic EPP (Energy Performance Preference) feature lets the kernel adjust the preference on its own, and it used to be only a system-wide switch. You can now turn it on per CPU core by choosing the "dynamic" preference under the powersave governor.