One corner of the Linux kernel may finally be getting ahead of the bugs that AI tools keep turning up. Releasing Linux 7.4-rc2 on Sunday evening, Linus Torvalds wrote that BPF lead developer Alexei Starovoitov “claims that on the bpf side at least the fixes are now coming in faster than the new reports, and that sounds lovely if true.”
Torvalds stopped well short of calling the problem solved. Most other parts of the kernel haven’t reached that point, he wrote, but “it’s at least a sign that we _may_ be starting to see the tide starting to turn.” He followed that with “Don’t hold your breath.”
He described rc2 as a big release candidate to go with the largest -rc1 ever. A lot of its bulk is automated Coccinelle cleanup, mostly one- and two-line changes that he received during the merge window and held back because he was on the road. With that noise taken out, the changes split into rough thirds: drivers (mostly GPU, networking and sound), networking and BPF, and everything else, mainly filesystems, memory management and architecture code. As for how much of it traces back to AI-found problems, Torvalds said he would stop repeating it, since “we can just take it for granted.”
The BPF claim has numbers behind it. Starovoitov, who co-created eBPF, the kernel facility for running sandboxed programs inside the kernel, is credited with 40 commits in the rc2 shortlog, more than anyone else. Many of them harden the BPF arena and verifier code, with titles such as “bpf: Refuse to map an arena at address 0” and “bpf: Don’t trust pointers spilled in slots that a callee can write,” and many come paired with new BPF selftests.
A record merge window came first
The week before, Torvalds’ 7.4-rc1 announcement put the merge window at almost 20,000 commits, compared with the more common figure of about 15,000. A full third of that patch was AMD GPU register offsets and bit masks. He wrote then that he was much happier to see the “flood of AI triggered work” land during the merge window than to see it arrive mostly as extra fixes during the -rc weeks, and called that “a much healthier model.” He also said some of the growth may come from people expecting 7.4 to be the next long-term support release.
The Register connected the surge to Anthropic’s Mythos bug-finding model, launched in April, which has helped developers find more software flaws than they could before. The kernel had already been adjusting. Linux 7.4 was set to orphan old EDAC drivers amid the AI-generated patch flood, and the project recently dropped its Assisted-by tag for AI disclosure.
Phoronix expects the stable Linux 7.4 release around the end of December.
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