The AppArmor improvements have been merged for Linux 7.3 for this kernel security module providing per-program Linux application security controls around system resources. Most notable this cycle is being able to load user-space compressed policies.

AppArmor in Linux 7.3+ can now load policies that have been compressed in user-space and submitted to the kernel, rather than just having the kernel module compress these policies after being loaded. The benefit of user-space compressed policies is faster load times.

Maxime Bélair of Canonical who implemented this feature noted as much as 30% improved system time for systems with "big profiles" for AppArmor. The user-space compressed profiles can also choose to use a higher compression level than the default kernel Zstd level for more space savings.

The user-space compressed policies can also be more beneficial for embedded Linux systems in only storing compressed policies for those platforms typically with very limited memory capacities.

AppArmor also adds an audit mode for silencing certain messages, refactoring network mediation to use new patterns, and various code clean-ups and bug fixes. More details on these now-merged AppArmor changes for Linux 7.3 via this pull request.

The Linux 7.3 merge window wraps up this weekend upon the v7.3-rc1 release.