Linus Torvalds says AI has made 'huge' Linux kernel updates the new normal

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Linus Torvalds says AI has made 'huge' Linux kernel updates the new normal

He’s not thrilled, but won’t let it delay the release of version 7.2

Simon Sharwood

Simon<br>Sharwood

APAC Editor

APAC Editor

Published<br>mon 10 Aug 2026 // 06:56 UTC

Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds thinks the project has reached a new normal of supersized updates, thanks to AI.<br>Torvalds posts a weekly state of the kernel update, and last week’s message opened with his observation that “This rc is huge.”<br>“Even by the ‘new normal’ standards this is a big rc, and I think it's the biggest rc6 we've had in years at least by commit count,” he wrote on August 2.

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Fast forward a week and the size of the release candidate remains a concern.

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“I can't say that I'm exactly thrilled about the size of this all,” Torvalds wrote in the message that announces the seventh release candidate for Linux 7.2. “But it is what it is: the new normal with a lot of fixes, many of them due to review by various AI tools.”<br>Torvalds has a complex relationship with AI. He’s previously railed against the idea that good documentation can explain the work of developers who use AI to contribute poor code to the kernel, and also complained that the Linux kernel security mailing list has become almost unmanageable due to a flood of AI-generated bug reports, many of them duplicates.<br>Torvalds has also declared “Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects,” and therefore all-but-welcomed machine-made contributions to the project.<br>While Torvalds is concerned about the size of rc7, he said “nothing looks particularly scary per se - it's just that there's a lot here.”<br>“Most of it is fairly small,” he wrote, before calling out three bigger changes: s390/zcrypt fixes, the return of the btrfs fixup worker infrastructure, and some netfilter ipset fixes.

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“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.”<br>All those little changes don’t add up to a reason to delay the release of Linux 7.2, and Torvalds wrote “I would expect that to happen next weekend unless something really bad pops up.”<br>By next Sunday, the world should therefore have a new version of the Linux kernel. Version 7.2 won’t be a long-term support release, but will include significant features such as improved scheduling for GPUs and CPUs. ®

linux<br>ai and ml<br>linus torvalds<br>os platforms

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