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The “slightly strange” diffstat was for Linux 7.3-rc5, not 7.3-rc7. Linus Torvalds said selftests made up a quarter of the rc5 diffstat; the evidence available does not show that half of rc7’s code was selftests. The “half” figure belongs to driver fixes in the following rc6 announcement.
What Torvalds said about the unusual diffstat
In his Linux 7.3-rc5 announcement, Torvalds described less than a third of the patch as drivers and a quarter as selftests. He called the pattern unusual, adding: “Not bad unusual, just not what I typically see.” Read the rc5 announcement.
Those proportions are Torvalds’s descriptions of diffstat categories, not independently recalculated totals. Crucially, the quarter figure is for rc5. It does not establish a selftest share for rc7.
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A diffstat measures the volume of changed files and lines, not how many patches or commits belong to a category. Torvalds noted that many driver patches were small, while some selftest patches were much larger. As a result, selftests could account for a substantial share of changed lines without representing the same share of submissions or development effort.
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The largest rc5 patch he identified was an arm64 KVM ITS table test. That is a concrete example of a test change large enough to affect the line-count picture. Counting commits instead would answer a different question: how many changes were submitted, rather than how much code changed.
What changed in rc6—and what “half” refers to
In the next release-candidate announcement, Torvalds said the diffstat had returned to its normal pattern, with about half of the diff in driver fixes. He also mentioned KVM-heavy architecture updates, core networking, SMB client filesystem work, BPF, and new selftests. Read the rc6 announcement.
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So the sequence is specific: rc5 had a quarter of its diffstat in selftests, according to Torvalds; rc6 had about half in driver fixes. Neither statement supports saying that half of rc7’s code was selftests.
What is established about Linux 7.3-rc7
The Linux Kernel Archives listed mainline 7.3-rc7 on October 12, 2026. That confirms the release candidate’s place in the series, but the checked release-specific sources do not establish an rc7 selftest percentage. An October 8 mailing-list item about an MM hotfix pull request shows development activity related to rc7; it does not provide the missing diffstat breakdown. Check the Linux Kernel Archives and the October mailing-list archive.
For a meaningful comparison, keep the candidate version attached to every figure and distinguish changed-line share from patch or commit counts. Without an rc7-specific announcement or calculation, the claim that rc7 had half its code in selftests remains unsubstantiated.
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