pops up," Torvalds said while announcing today's release candidate.
But there's something interesting about Linux 7.2-rc7, writes Phoronix. "By the time the Linux kernel typically hits a -rc7 release things have usually settled quite well. But in today's world of AI/LLM coding/review agents, the kernel activity continues at an all-time high."
Tons of bug fixes continued to trickle in across the kernel spectrum for all sorts of issues. The HWMON hardware monitoring subsystem saw several critical and high severity bug fixes, on the memory management side was a nasty race condition leading to a use-after-free in the kernel for the past eight years, Btrfs restored its fixup worker infrastructure to deal with silent data loss, lots of AI patches in the networking realm, and the kernel was patched for the Safe RET Interrupt Vulnerability.
Linus Torvalds wrote in the 7.2-rc7 announcement:
"Another week, another -rc.
I can't say that I'm exactly thrilled about the size of this all, but
it is what it is: the new normal with a lot of fixes, many of them due
to review by various AI tools.
And nothing looks particularly scary per se — it's just that there's a
lot here. Most of it is fairly small, although we have a couple of
larger diffs: s390/zcrypt fixes stand out in the diffstat, and so does
btrfs bringing back the fixup worker infrastructure. And some
netfilter ipset fixes.
But aside from a few places like that, most of this is just lots of
tiny fixes. It's pretty much spread all over — drivers (gpu, sound,
networking, you name it), filesystems, core networking, arch code...
Read more of this story at Slashdot.