Linus Torvalds used Claude Code to build a Linux page cache fix that hit 23x read throughput, but kernel reviewers found a race before anything merged.
It seems that after the initial AI-generated patches there’s been good discussion amongst the kernel devs about sorting out the issues, and a few revisions already that have tidied things up a bit.
So if after all that there ends up being a good performance improvement directly from a revised AI-created patch, what do I do with my pitchfork? Still raised angrily? Half-mast? Do I just let the torch smoulder?
I look forward to the community providing an outline of tools and techniques that I’m allowed to use and/or being labeled as woke/nazi depending on which brand of social media outrage is currently waxing.
Torvalds had spent 18 months running a broken version of his own fix for the page-cache reference-counting bottleneck, while other developers had encountered problems with their approaches.
The article mentions he had been working on solving the issue for 18 months already… so at least that long.
I’m still mad because the source is still tainted. You can guarantee that the contributions of unwilling people, { who 1) did not intend their work to be used by a for profit LLM, and 2) actively do not want their work used by an LLM at all }, is part of these changes.
Scraping isn’t reading, etc etc. But also when did we just stop respecting people’s wishes with the stuff they post? Like I made my own word scramble js script because a website owner didn’t get back to me on whether I could use theirs, even though the script is right there to copy paste.
These companies just did the yolo founder-disrupter impatient thing when they could have been chill and done this all legit.
Maybe it did, but apparently the code was not properly reviewed initially, so there could be other hidden problems.
Of course that’s the same for human made code, but there’s a problem in only judging code from how it performs, and not actually understanding the code. And that seems to be the situation with a lot of AI code.
100% that is the worst place to have the problem originate.
I have rarely disagreed with Linus Torvalds on things regarding the kernel, and maybe I’m wrong, but I strongly disagree with him on this issue. Contributing code nobody understands cannot be a good thing.
The code still undergoes the exact same code review as before.
That’s not good enough, because it is well documented that AI often make mistakes and absolutely needs to undergo way stricter review.
It is also well documented that although you can achieve some results quickly, AI code also quickly becomes impossible to maintain.
If nobody understands the code, as it seems was the case here, and it is introduced anyway, the kernel is doomed to deteriorate.
My wife has already noticed deteriorating quality in Debian, with system hangs after they loosened the requirements for AI code. The quality of Debian now is lower than it has been in a decade!
Is it an understanding failure, an unexpected interaction, or just an existing issue now exposed? A 23x performance increase could very well expose an existing race condition that systems weren’t fast enough to run into.
People make mistakes. Software bugs existing at all is proof of this. This is certainly not the first time a change Torvalds approved has an issue, and it won’t be the last.
There’s a reason code is reviewed, and there’s a reason people still go through after it is approved and verify. The process is working exactly as designed, the way it has for decades before AI coding.
Expecting absolute perfection is ridiculous, the anti-AI circlejerk acting like only AI fucks up just makes them look ridiculous. Any developer could have developed this fix, and there would be no article. Nothing in this issue is specific to AI usage and treating it like it is somehow special just undermines arguments against AI slop and vibe coding in general.
Not based on speculation, based on numerous analysis of the problems with using AI code you don’t understand.
Clearly Linus failed to understand the code, otherwise he wouldn’t have suggested it for submission.
You seem to have a problem with criticism of Linus, is it a religious thing?
Race Conditions are common. This isn’t new to AI. Nobody writes stories about them though unless they lead to security issues (like with XFS, which had one for 10 years and only fixed recently).
There is a lot happening in the kernel, its not always a matter of looking in one tiny location. A race condition is pretty broad and can lead to many things.
Patches get rejected all the time, for reasons including race conditions which are identified.
If you check the post, other developers had tried and failed to fix the same issue. He’s not the only one. It was just yet another failed attempt
Optimisation is HARD, and always has been.
Finally, you say “suggested it for submission”. That code would go to a staging repo first for testing. He wasn’t suggesting pushing it immediately to the main tree…
Standard development tools (at least for my development work) wouldn’t catch race conditions (maybe commercial ones / high end ones would)… AI is actually far better at detecting these things
This isn’t a unique or interesting story in any capacity… It’s boring and normal
Of course of course. How dare you blaspheme against our Lord and Saviour, filthy infidel!
But anyway, I’d like to be as enlightened as you. Could you name any of those numerous analyses that detail exactly what Torvalds did and what he failed to understand?
No I can’t, because those are so general and commonly known, that if you somehow are unaware, you must have been living under a rock for the past year.
The second option is that you are just trolling or for some reason is in denial.
Either way I’m not wasting my time on any of those options.
Impressive, probably kind of like I can answer math questions very very fast.
That what I thought, I can answer math questions fast, but I don’t claim to be able to answer them correctly.
It seems that after the initial AI-generated patches there’s been good discussion amongst the kernel devs about sorting out the issues, and a few revisions already that have tidied things up a bit.
So if after all that there ends up being a good performance improvement directly from a revised AI-created patch, what do I do with my pitchfork? Still raised angrily? Half-mast? Do I just let the torch smoulder?
You have to vow to use a new fork (which someone else should totally create) which does not contain this one specific patch.
Congratulations and thank you for volunteering! I look forward to your repo release. You are never allowed to stop maintaining this fork.
I look forward to the community providing an outline of tools and techniques that I’m allowed to use and/or being labeled as woke/nazi depending on which brand of social media outrage is currently waxing.
Man, people really don’t like systemd
And cause more environmental harm through inefficient tech?
Based
Wonder how much time it had taken without AI
The article mentions he had been working on solving the issue for 18 months already… so at least that long.
I’m still mad because the source is still tainted. You can guarantee that the contributions of unwilling people, { who 1) did not intend their work to be used by a for profit LLM, and 2) actively do not want their work used by an LLM at all }, is part of these changes.
Scraping isn’t reading, etc etc. But also when did we just stop respecting people’s wishes with the stuff they post? Like I made my own word scramble js script because a website owner didn’t get back to me on whether I could use theirs, even though the script is right there to copy paste.
These companies just did the yolo founder-disrupter impatient thing when they could have been chill and done this all legit.
So you’re saying the review process worked as designed?
Maybe it did, but apparently the code was not properly reviewed initially, so there could be other hidden problems.
Of course that’s the same for human made code, but there’s a problem in only judging code from how it performs, and not actually understanding the code. And that seems to be the situation with a lot of AI code.
And particularly disturbing when the human understanding failure is from the original and lead Linux developer.
100% that is the worst place to have the problem originate.
I have rarely disagreed with Linus Torvalds on things regarding the kernel, and maybe I’m wrong, but I strongly disagree with him on this issue. Contributing code nobody understands cannot be a good thing.
You people act like Linux adopted an all-AI pipeline.
The code still undergoes the exact same code review as before, because humans were the original slop coders.
The standards needed for code to be accepted haven’t changed at all. Even the code Linus personally is reviewed…
That’s not good enough, because it is well documented that AI often make mistakes and absolutely needs to undergo way stricter review.
It is also well documented that although you can achieve some results quickly, AI code also quickly becomes impossible to maintain.
If nobody understands the code, as it seems was the case here, and it is introduced anyway, the kernel is doomed to deteriorate.
My wife has already noticed deteriorating quality in Debian, with system hangs after they loosened the requirements for AI code. The quality of Debian now is lower than it has been in a decade!
Maybe you need to watch something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ARF2KcDgc
Removed by mod
Maybe because you are making stupid ignorant comments.
Is it an understanding failure, an unexpected interaction, or just an existing issue now exposed? A 23x performance increase could very well expose an existing race condition that systems weren’t fast enough to run into.
People make mistakes. Software bugs existing at all is proof of this. This is certainly not the first time a change Torvalds approved has an issue, and it won’t be the last.
There’s a reason code is reviewed, and there’s a reason people still go through after it is approved and verify. The process is working exactly as designed, the way it has for decades before AI coding.
Expecting absolute perfection is ridiculous, the anti-AI circlejerk acting like only AI fucks up just makes them look ridiculous. Any developer could have developed this fix, and there would be no article. Nothing in this issue is specific to AI usage and treating it like it is somehow special just undermines arguments against AI slop and vibe coding in general.
I’d say do better but that’s not likely to happen.
So, let me get this right. You’re disapproving on how things were handled based on your speculation of how it went?
Not based on speculation, based on numerous analysis of the problems with using AI code you don’t understand.
Clearly Linus failed to understand the code, otherwise he wouldn’t have suggested it for submission.
You seem to have a problem with criticism of Linus, is it a religious thing?
You understand it less it sounds like.
This isn’t a unique or interesting story in any capacity… It’s boring and normal
For Christ sake, of course I know that.
Of course of course. How dare you blaspheme against our Lord and Saviour, filthy infidel!
But anyway, I’d like to be as enlightened as you. Could you name any of those numerous analyses that detail exactly what Torvalds did and what he failed to understand?
No I can’t, because those are so general and commonly known, that if you somehow are unaware, you must have been living under a rock for the past year.
The second option is that you are just trolling or for some reason is in denial.
Either way I’m not wasting my time on any of those options.
Only while there are still reviewers who care to review the slop. Which is a rare breed and will quickly soon vanish.
I bet some projects will get more tolerance and love than others, based on value and utility. The kernel will get more, and Systemd will get less.
Yes, but it’s bad because software has bugs.