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Development statistics for the 7.2 kernel

79 points farlight 1 hour ago 34 comments

05kqhg 1 hour ago | parent

The headline is "Development statistics for the 7.2 kernel", and the last paragraph is highly LLM critical in contrast with the editorialized headline "Linux bugs fixed per release over time: >2× rise since 2026-04", which seems to imply some sort of Mythos bug finding.

From the last paragraph:

"The Linux kernel is aimed at production use, not research or experimentation. But there is currently a massive experiment being run on the kernel's development processes and community."

mh- 43 minutes ago | parent

The following sentence:

"This community has absorbed new processes and tools many times over its 35-year history, and will almost certainly find a way to do that this time as well. But that absorption has not always been without turbulence along the way."

Matl 1 hour ago | parent

While great in theory, the flip side is all the slop patches and PRs that both the kernel and open source in general now has to deal with, often with only agents as responders.

It honestly doesn't want to make me open anything for outside contributions anymore.

mathisfun123 1 hour ago | parent

greatly exaggerated as indicated by linus' own feelings

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=whTs09_ozN+e09GU68N1wPP56...

senderista 56 minutes ago | parent

Linus's claim that use of LLM tools is uncorrelated with understanding or competence is ludicrous.

mathisfun123 52 minutes ago | parent

how do you feel about his analogy

> Here's a new rule just for you: don't use compilers for any of your kernel submissions.

> Because if you can't show that you really understand what the machine is actually doing by writing your code in assembler, then I don't want to see your code contribution. You clearly aren't competent if you can't write it that way.

Matl 39 minutes ago | parent

I feel like you can't compare deterministic tools to non-deterministic ones so not a great analogy.

mathisfun123 36 minutes ago | parent

the question is about whether you understand in the slightest the output of the tool. does the determinism of the compiler somehow imbue you with a better understanding of the assembly it generates?

sedan_baklazhan 3 minutes ago | parent

Yes. If you understand C code well, you have a very good understanding of what will actually happen when the binary is executed.

bitwize 14 minutes ago | parent

It doesn't really matter.

The point is, new technology arrived that allowed developers to do much more. Existing programmers hemmed and hawed about it because it threatened their egos, making easy what they once found very difficult. But the sensible engineers adopted the technology.

AI may not be deterministic, but on small to medium-sized tasks it produces more correct code, more reliably, faster than a human developer does. By any objective measure, not adopting it is professional irresponsibility.

cwillu 49 minutes ago | parent

Presumably the person who's full-time job is staying on top of proposed changes to the linux source tree knows something about this; what are your credentials on the topic?

vlovich123 47 minutes ago | parent

As an example, I’m in the process of putting up a patch series to optimize some specific filesystem operations. The amount of boilerplate that has to know to get done is completely unapproachable to an outsider both from the amount of time needed to learn that boilerplate and form it in such a way that maintainers will be happy. Even though I know exactly how the code is working, it bridges that understanding gap but I don’t see how it correlates with incompetence. I may be an outlier but I suspect there’s a huge amount of people who are extremely capable and competent and it’s just that the Linux kernel has so many processes that it’s difficult to onboard into the community without LLM assistance.

MobiusHorizons 20 minutes ago | parent

The Linux kernel project is not hurting for contributors nor was it prior to LLMs. The processes you describe as roadblocks don’t seem to have been preventing the Linux kernel from getting code contributions. Maybe they don’t need or want more easy onboarding or broader audience?

munchbunny 46 minutes ago | parent

What he actually said was:

> The kind of expectations I have is that people do their best and I expect people to understand what they are doing.

> But that understanding has very little to do with what tools they use.

> And quite honestly, in my experience, the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools.

He’s saying that understanding or competence are more about the person than their AI use. I think that’s a reasonable argument, even though I disagree on the basis that it’s at least a little correlated in the shortcuts in understanding the many devs I’ve seen (not all, but a nontrivial amount) seem to be taking.

senderista 20 minutes ago | parent

To be clear: I believe that it's entirely possible to use LLMs to amplify understanding and competence, but that in practice LLM usage is anticorrelated with understanding and competence. This is about empirical reality, not logical entailment.

rvz 19 minutes ago | parent

Clearly, Linus is all over the place here.

He used Claude Code to write one of his patches in [1] and introduced a data race bug in the kernel unbeknownst to himself but this bug was caught by other reviewer [1] before it made it into a new kernel release.

So I'm afraid Linus himself did not understand the changes Claude made to the code he submitted in the mailing list, despite his "principles" in telling others previously that AI was creating slop patches and then now shouting at others who were concerned about using LLMs on code where they do not understand the generated code themselves when it all applied to....himself.

[0] https://lkml.iu.edu/2610.1/13146.html

[1] https://lkml.iu.edu/2610.1/13573.html

pelagicAustral 1 hour ago | parent

To the surprise of no one. Although, I must recognise that I did not envision a future where Linus embraced AI as frictionless has its been, then again after the inclusion of Rust in the kernel, I probably would've risked some money on it.

nvme0n1p1 59 minutes ago | parent

Yes, Linus is quite forward thinking, and we can credit that with why Linux has stayed relevant for so many decades. Not many software projects manage to pull that off.

nomel 58 minutes ago | parent

> where Linus embraced AI as frictionless has its been

Why? He seems very pragmatic. I fully expected him to embrace it, with the only concern being correctness and quality.

pelagicAustral 53 minutes ago | parent

True, but I think there are quite a few very pragmatic people in here, and yet you see the they don't exactly go around singing praises.

bitwize 13 minutes ago | parent

The pragmatic ones are excited about where things are going.

The ones complaining about "slop" are the ones going on vibes now.

mycall 35 minutes ago | parent

Also, it took a long time for rust to mature to be considered for linux kernel development. AI is faster but easier to integrate.

teekert 13 minutes ago | parent

100%. Too many people equate LLM assisted programming with vibe coding some slop. Which is just a weird thing to do at this point.

cwillu 58 minutes ago | parent

Please don't editorialize titles.

(Edit: title has been fixed)

dang 52 minutes ago | parent

Submitted title was "Linux bugs fixed per release over time: >2× rise since 2026-04". We've reverted it now.

Submitters: If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

lurk2 45 minutes ago | parent

I got shadow banned. How do I delete my account?

ogoffart 51 minutes ago | parent

I have noticed the same on my project.

The agent helps a lot to fix bugs. Just point the agents at the bug reports. They do the reproduction, debugging and fixes. We "just" have to review. (Sometimes ask more details and tell we'd prefer another approach.) This makes bug fixing much faster and automated.

And at the same time, it seems we get less bug reports to our library. I think user just use their agents to code, and agents don't report bugs, they just work it around somehow.

So overall, the open bug count is decreasing. Which somehow feels good.

On the other hand, we get a lot of PR made by other's people agents, which can be a bit overwhelming when it's just a huge code drop. We can't easily review that.

fock 15 minutes ago | parent

also the agent might introduce bugs, just like a human (see rsync which now has very busy development). Likely we (and the LLM) just won't notice them as easily. Fun times I guess.

jayd16 49 minutes ago | parent

The major issue with these kinds of blurbs is that there's no control.

Historical numbers are not valid because incentivizes of a well funded entity have changed. It would require an equally well funded push to up the patch numbers without LLMs to really measure the impact in a quantifiable way.

zdw 38 minutes ago | parent

Greg KH did a video on the flood of LLM created stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnV_cWeoo5Q , HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49929391

Which covers how he responds and pushes back on much of this, as well as asking for a patch (not just bug reports)

lousken 33 minutes ago | parent

atlantic 0000:0f:00.0: PM: dpm_run_callback(): pci_pm_resume.llvm.11545057702175119861 returns -12

atlantic 0000:0f:00.0: PM: failed to resume async: error -12

AI fix this, thanks

viraptor 6 minutes ago | parent

You can literally do that now. Exactly as you wrote it...