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Linux 7.1: Kicinski Called It ‘LLM-pocalypse.’ Then Deleted 138,000 Lines (canartuc.medium.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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https://archive.is/6lDzT

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[–] 18 points 6 months ago

The bug reports may not be arriving yet. They will. And when they do, you will face the same calculation the kernel maintainers faced: maintain dead code to satisfy automated reporters, or cut it.

This could actually be a good thing for software quality.

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    [–] 21 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (7 children)

    no paywall here:

    Edit: looking for a mirror.

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  • [–] 21 points 6 months ago* (6 children)

    YSK archive.is uses you to maliciously DDOS a random blogger they don't like and other weird stuff.

    https://cybernews.com/security/archive-today-launches-ddos-directing-visitors-to-attack-blog/

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  • [–] 38 points 6 months ago

    In a world where psychopathic mega corporations are openly looking for ways to enslave humanity and bring about the end of the planet, the weird tantrums of an obviously mentally spicy web site owner just seem cute.

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    • [–] 10 points 6 months ago (10 children)

    I doubt the Linux kernel allowing slop patch submissions with potentially higher rate of hidden insidious bugs will help the LLM-pocalypse much...

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  • [–] 22 points 6 months ago (9 children)

    That's not kernel policy but LF guidance. From the kernel's point of view patches still have a high bar to pass to get merged and I don't think we have enough data yet to see if LLM based submissions to the kernel have a higher or lower error rate than humans.

    I certainly feel the uptick in LLM reports though - one of the projects I'm working on is seeing a deluge of them at the moment.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (8 children)

    The kernel policy seems to be what I think it is, since LLM slop patches have been merged. Edit: I call it "slop" since it's LLM code, and I'm aware some use that word differently.

    I find it slightly contradictory to delete code due to hidden bugs on the one end, then insert LLM code at the other rather than hand-craft the code to avoid hidden bugs better.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    How is that patch sloppy?

    I feel the term slop is being overused to cover anything an LLM has touched. If I ask an agent to re-read a mail thread for me and apply the changes to my tree to review is that slop? Would you feel better about it if I copy and paste from email to code in my editor?

    I've just been doing a bunch of bug triage which was mostly driven by the agent although I checked the issues where it had commented. Was that slop? Ironically a lot of the issues where AI generated although for the most part more complete than a lot of the purely human submissions we get. Are those bug reports slop? What about the poorly drafted human ones?

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    Are you saying that AI slop is bad in those (counts) 4 removed lines of code?

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    I'm saying if their policy is to accept AI code, which the link seems to demonstrate that it is, the rate of future hidden errors in the kernel code is likely going to go up. This is what all the studies are saying, including those involving competent coders.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    Hm... How well does FreeBSD run games? It still uses WINE and Proton, right?

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago*

    I heard it's alright for games and many apparently work. Sadly, FreeBSD simply doesn't seem to have drivers for a lot of hardware that I'm using. And as far as I know, they don't have an LLM policy yet (so they could still come out in favor of it).

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    • 12 comments in c/linux@programming.dev view that post
    [–] 22 points 6 months ago

    This is great.
    The unused code is (now) no longer an attack surface.
    If Kicinski is wrong, someone needs to take ownership of the module and it gets re-added.
    Win-Win.

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    [–] 12 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Do you have an archive of the archive? archive.is seems to be captchablocked as it is impossible to get through the captcha, it just reloads every time I solve it.

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    • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (5 children)

    The archive.is link is also borked on my end

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  • [–] 26 points 6 months ago* (4 children)

    Linux 7.1: Kicinski Called It ‘LLM-pocalypse.’ Then Deleted 138,000 Lines.

    The Linux networking maintainer wrote about an ‘LLM-pocalypse’ in the same pull request that deleted 138,000 lines from the kernel.

    One hundred thirty-eight thousand lines. One pull request.

    “If we want to have a fighting chance of surviving the LLM-pocalypse, this code needs to find a dedicated owner or get deleted.”

    Jakub Kicinski, Linux networking maintainer, wrote that in his pull request message. Then he deleted it. All of it. Six entire subsystems. 138,000 lines of networking code that the world switched off years ago but the kernel kept compiling anyway.

    On April 26, 2026, Linus Torvalds merged that pull request into Linux 7.1-rc1.

    The first time in Linux history that AI-generated bug reports forced the removal of working software. Kicinski made it happen, and Linus approved for rc1 release; it ships to every server, phone, and embedded device running Linux within months. These protocols are permanently removed from the kernel.

    What Kicinski Actually Deleted

    Over 138,000 lines were erased in a merge window that also brought 12,996 changesets from 2,011 developers, 342 of them first-timers. The explicit motivation for the deletions: AI-generated security bug reports are flooding maintainers with work on code that has no real users left.

    The networking subsystem removed ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), AX.25, amateur radio networking, ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), Bluetooth CMTP (the bridge protocol between Bluetooth and ISDN), CAIF (Communication CPU to Application CPU Interface), and dozens of old ISA, PCMCIA, and PCI networking drivers.

    ATM was already a relic when I was debugging VLAN (Virtual LAN) tagging issues in 2008 at a telecommunications company during my internship. ISDN was the protocol our office PBX (Private Branch Exchange) used before I ripped it out and replaced it with SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) trunks. These protocols didn’t matter anymore, but a decade ago. The code stayed because every maintainer feared breaking a setup they could not see.

    CC @belazor@lemmy.zip

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    • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Aww, kinda sad about AX.25

    I think my packet radio setup might be fucked by that.

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