Greg KH Forewarns Of "Rough" Linux 7.3 Kernel Cycle Due To Continued AI Churn

While Linux 7.3-rc1 only released this week and there are another roughly seven weeks to go until the official kernel release, Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman is already warning that it's likely to be another "rough" kernel cycle given the ongoing noise caused by AI/LLM with the increase in bug reports and kernel patches. Linux kernel developers continue to be bombarded by various patches for AI-generated bug fixes... Some that are genuine while others not so useful and in many instances affecting areas of the Linux kernel codebase not seeing much activity in years or for drivers that are obsolete or not widely-used. All in it's been a rough year for the upstream Linux kernel maintainers. Greg KH remarked on social.kernel.org: "Things don’t seem to be slowing down in kernel development world, even for old subsystems that should be “stable”. Here’s my “todo” mbox filtered for linux-usb stuff, that has come in in the past few weeks: ---Mutt: =todo [Msgs:1732/4807 Inc:2 78M]--- This is going to be a rough -rc cycle…" And then followed up with: "Ok, after a first cut at the "easy" ones that obviously fix a bug, or are an older version that got superseded by a newer submission: ``` ---Mutt: =todo [Msgs:1094/4170 Inc:2 69M]--- ``` still crazy though..." He went on to clarify in that thread while he does push back often against a number of the AI-generated submissions, he doesn't want to downright deny obvious bug fixes: " I push back a lot, but refusing "obviously a bugfix" is hard, and I don't want to do that, it will just take time to grind through them all. Like I've been saying for the past few months in talks, "It's going to be a long 18 months", and somehow that number doesn't seem to get shorter...." These patches he's talking about here are for the Linux USB subsystem he oversees. For the staging area of the kernel that Greg also oversees, he enacted a policy of no AI/LLM patches except for real security fixes to cut down on the noise. Greg also commented that a "huge majority" of the patches at the moment are coming from static analysis tooling that are "finding really old minor things that can be triggered if you "hold it wrong"." So Linux 7.3 is looking like it will be another heavy cycle with a lot of patch churn. Linux 7.3 stable should be out on 18 October or could get pushed back to 25 October if it's a very brutal cycle in the final weeks.