The Linux Kernel AI Flood, Linux 7.2 Release & Other August Highlights

It was a very busy month of August with the Linux kernel developers continue to be flooded with AI/LLM-generated patches and bug reports. Plus there was the general resolution on AI usage within the Debian project and other open-source projects now evolving in the AI era. With the Linux 7.2 stable release and Linux 7.3 merge window, the past month was all the more eventful. During the last month on Phoronix there were 313 original news articles and another 18 Linux hardware reviews and multi-page benchmark articles. All written by your's truly. If you enjoy all the original Linux/open-source-related content on Phoronix each and every day, please consider showing your support by joining Phoronix Premium for ad-free browsing, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode, and other benefits while most of all helping the site continue to survive. At the very least please disable any ad-blockers for this site. You can optionally show your support too via tips by Stripe or PayPal. Thanks for your support during these difficult times for helping to allow Linux hardware testing to continue. When it came to the most popular news over the course of August, the highlights included: Longtime Linux CIFS/SMB3 Maintainer Passes Away There is a changing of the guard with Linux 7.3 as the maintainer of the Common Internet File System (CIFS) / SMB3 code within the Linux kernel. Longtime maintainer, principal Linux CIFS author, and current Microsoft employee Steve French has stepped down due to health reasons. Linus Torvalds Endures A Debug Session From Hell, "Enormously Helped" By AI It's pretty rare to see Linus Torvalds author patches himself pertaining to the open-source Linux graphics drivers, but waking up this morning I was surprised to see he authored and committed an Intel Xe kernel graphics driver change himself. It ended up being after he encountered a "debug session from hell" but was ultimately helped by AI in fixing a bug that had been irking him. Wayland Found To Be "Intrinsically Faster Than X11, But Not Necessarily More Efficient" The PorteuX Linux distribution focused on being a high performance, modular, and minimalist distro took to forking Xfce's xfwm4 window manager into "xfwm4-gl" for OpenGL compositing support. As part of that they developed a window manager / compositor benchmark for evaluating the performance and efficiency of typical operations. Their results are fascinating. The Linux Kernel Is Approaching 2,000 CVEs Per Release With the proliferation of AI/LLM models analyzing the Linux kernel's vast codebase, there has been a surge in the number of CVEs per kernel release. After typically being around 500 CVEs fixed per release, we are now approaching 2,000 CVEs fixed per release and perhaps will break that threshold for Linux 7.3. Linux's Staging Area To Now Reject LLM-Generated Patches, Except For Real Security Fixes While Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman does use AI / LLMs himself to success in the Linux kernel, given the "onslaught" of kernel patches produced by large language models and the intent on the Linux kernel's staging area being an area for newcomers to get involved, moving forward he's now rejecting AI/LLM-generated staging patches. But there is one exception and that is for genuinely valid security fixes. Debian Votes To Allow "Responsible Use Of Generative AI" The voting is over and there is a winner now known in the much-debated Debian General Resolution voting over an AI policy for the Linux distribution. GNOME 51 Beta Released With Many Minor Improvements The beta release of GNOME 51 is now available for testing. This cycle for the beta milestone is mostly a wide collection of minor improvements throughout the vast package set. Prominent Arch Linux Developer Resigns After 10 Year Run Arch Linux developer, security team member, AUR maintainer, and package maintainer Morten Linderud "Foxboron" announced today he is resigning from the project. California Passes AB-1856 For Open-Source Relief Over Age Verification As an update to the May story about California's age verification law may end up exempting most Linux distributions, that AB-1856 bill has finally passed! Specially Crafted NTFS File-System Image Allows Root Access On Linux With NTFS3 Driver A reported security vulnerability for the NTFS3 driver has gone unaddressed since being reported earlier this summer. The vulnerability allows a pre-crafted NTFS image on a USB flash drive or similar to allow the user to gain root access to the running Linux system. GNOME Designers Lay Out Some Of Their GNOME Shell Dreams GNOME interaction designer Tobias Bernard has shared some of the plans and ideas for long-term GNOME Shell improvements they have been eyeing for future GNOME releases. Linux 7.3 Network Changes Merged But Developers "Completely Overwhelmed" Due To AI/LLMs All of the networking subsystem feature updates were merged today for the Linux 7.3 kernel's merge window. There are a lot of wired and wireless networking improvements this cycle but also a ton of bug fixes -- including many not so important fixes spun up by AI/LLM agents. The networking subsystem maintainers admit now they are "completely overwhelmed" due to this code churn from the output of AI large language models. ReactOS 0.4.16 Released With New Graphical Installer, Better Hardware Support ReactOS 0.4.16 released today as the newest major update to this "open-source Windows" project providing an open-source OS with Windows driver and application compatibility. Cloudflare Announces Open-Source Cloudflare OS As AI "Operating System" Cloudflare today announced the open-sourcing of Cloudflare OS as an "open platform for agents, apps, and work." Cloudflare OS is an AI "operating system" but not in the traditional OS sense. FFmpeg 9.0 Released With More Vulkan Acceleration, Animated WebP & More AMD AMF FFmpeg 9.0 is now available as the latest feature release for this widely used, open-source multimedia library. Steam On Linux Use Back Above 4% In July Valve just published the Steam Survey results for July 2026 and point to a small uptick in Linux gaming use. GNOME Boxes Preparing To Deliver Much Improved Virtualization Experience GNOME Boxes as a front-end to libvirt and QEMU is preparing to deliver a much improved virtualization experience for those wanting to enjoy desktop VMs from the GNOME desktop. Linux 7.2 Released With Faster I/O, New AMD & Intel Driver Improvements Linus Torvalds just released Linux 7.2 as stable! After a very busy kernel cycle due to the increased patch and reporting churn due to AI/LLM ages, Linux 7.2 managed to make it out today on-schedule for this feature-packed kernel. Linux 7.2 is going on to power Ubuntu 26.10 and other upcoming Linux distribution releases. OpenAI Brings ChatGPT Desktop App To Linux OpenAI announced today they have brought their ChatGPT Desktop application to Linux and is currently in preview form. Linux 7.3 Looks Like It Will Upstream FailFS Merged back in Linux 7.0 was NULLFS as a "completely catatonic minimal pseudo filesystem". Now expected for Linux 7.3 is its sibling: FailFS. And the most viewed featured articles/reviews: Benchmarking Six Linux Distributions On The Framework Laptop 13 Pro With the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro now shipping powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) and a brand new hardware design, I have spent the past week testing out various Linux distributions on this very nice high-end laptop. All of the modern Linux distributions tested have been playing nicely with this new Panther Lake laptop. Of course, beyond testing for compatibility I also took the opportunity to run some Linux distribution performance benchmarks for this laptop powered by the flagship Core Ultra X9 388H. The CachyOS Performance vs. Other Linux Operating Systems On A $46k USD Workstation Recently I looked at the performance of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS vs. Windows 11 on the Intel Xeon 678X running within the HP Z4 G6i workstation. Linux performed admirably as one would expect. With this Intel Xeon Granite Rapids WS workstation from HP though commanding a retail price more than $46,000 USD, you likely want nothing but the utmost performance out of it. So for those looking to maximize the OS performance, here are some numbers from the HP Z4 G6i workstation when running not only Ubuntu 26.04 LTS but also Fedora Workstation 44, AlmaLinux, and the performance-optimized CachyOS. Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS & XFS On Linux 7.2 vs. Linux 7.3 Performance Earlier this week I showed off some of the very nice Btrfs performance gains on Linux 7.3. For those wondering what kernel optimizations may have carried over to other file-systems or other file-system specific enhancements, here are Linux 7.2 vs. 7.3 Git performance benchmarks across Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS on the same system. Benchmarking Some Incredible Performance Gains With Btrfs On Linux 7.3 With the Btrfs pull request for Linux 7.3 having delivered more performance optimizations with some ~3x and ~5x gains mentioned in specific areas, I was eager to test out the new Btrfs performance on the in-development kernel. In today's article are some benchmarks of Btrfs on Linux 7.2 stable compared to Linux 7.3 Git with some very enticing performance gains confirmed in various workloads. Framework Laptop 16 With GeForce RTX 5070 12GB, One-Piece Keyboard & Haptic Touchpad While the past few weeks have been quite busy with the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro testing with that all-new laptop model and paired with Intel's Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake", at the same time Framework Computer has begun shipping some updated components for the Framework Laptop 16 laptop. If looking for a bit more GPU compute power hor larger form factor than the 13-inch model, the Framework Laptop 16 can now be equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 GPU as well as a haptic touchpad and one-piece keyboard for improving the input experience. Analyzing Fedora's Slow Performance On The Framework Laptop 13 Pro With Intel Panther Lake As part of my recent Linux testing of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro I had recently benchmarked six Linux distributions on the Framework Laptop 13 Pro. CachyOS was the fastest to not much surprise but arguably the most surprising aspect was finding Fedora Workstation 44 typically running slower than the five other modern Linux distributions benchmarked. Here's a follow-up to that with more Fedora Linux benchmarks and the cause/workaround for Fedora's slower performance on the Intel Panther Lake laptop. The Beneficial Performance Gains Running The Framework Laptop Pro 13 / Core Ultra X9 388H With Linux 7.1+ The recently launched Framework Laptop 13 Pro powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" runs well on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and other modern Linux distributions. In the case of Ubuntu 26.04 with Linux 7.0, while everything works, if upgrading to Linux 7.1 or the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is even better performance. Here are benchmarks of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro with Core Ultra X9 388H across the Linux 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2 kernels. Early Linux 7.3 Kernel Benchmarks Show Some Performance Improvements, Some Regressions Being halfway through the Linux 7.3 kernel merge window and prior to wrapping up and sending back the HP Z4 G6i workstation powered by the Xeon 678X Granite Rapids WS processor, I decided to run some benchmarks to see how Linux 7.3 Git is performing relative to the prior stable kernel series. Here are the first benchmarks of this early state of Linux 7.3 with some performance improvements as well as some regressions. AMD EPYC 9005 Series Memory Scaling Performance From 4 To 24 DDR5 RDIMMs With today's memory prices, a frequent question at Phoronix and throughout many organizations is about reducing cost by not necessarily populating all memory channels. Especially with modern servers going up to 12 memory channels per socket or even 16 memory channels with upcoming EPYC Venice, you may be curious about the performance impact of populating less memory channels to see if the trade-off is worthwhile given today's DDR5 RDIMM pricing. In this article are benchmarks from a Dell PowerEdge server looking at a dual AMD EPYC 9655 2P configuration when testing between four and the full twenty-four DDR5-6400 RDIMM configuration and the resulting performance impact in more than 250 benchmarks. Intel Hyper Threading Performance On The Xeon 678X "Granite Rapids-WS" With the Intel Xeon 678X "Granite Rapids WS" processor that I have been recently testing within the HP Z4 G6i workstation, there are 48 cores plus with Hyper Threading is a total of 96 threads for this high-end workstation processor with a 300 Watt TDP. For those curious about the performance impact of HT/SMT on this Intel Xeon 600 series workstation processor, here are some comparison benchmarks. Here's to hopefully an even more interesting September!