OS PLATFORMS
Last week, he blamed himself for being ‘a grade A nincompoop’ who assumed a system upgrade couldn’t possibly go wrong
Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has decided he might as well blame AI for a version 7.3 release candidate that’s larger than was usually the case before LLMs came into our lives.
“This didn’t *feel* like a particularly busy rc2, but it clearly was,” he wrote in his regular Sunday kernel update post. “rc2 is usually the quietest time when people take a breather after the merge window and it takes a while to start finding bugs. But not this time – this is a ‘full fat’ rc release.”
Torvalds said he can’t find a single cause for the big release.
“I’d like to point to the late EDAC pull that was forgotten and didn’t happen during the merge window, but honestly, that’s a fairly small thing,” he wrote. “No, rc2 had several filesystems sending in their fixes, and there’s a fairly sizable drm pull with lots of scattered fixes. Along with networking and bpf sending in fixes. *And* a number of driver trees too.”
“Nothing looks particularly odd,” he added. “It might be just random, but we’ll obviously all blame it on AI, because whether that’s really the cause or not, it’s an easy thing to blame ;)”
Last week, Torvalds blamed himself for kernel complications in the post announcing the first release candidate for Linux 7.3.
“Nothing really stands out – except for the fact that it’s big. It’s not the biggest rc1 we’ve ever had, but it’s certainly up there, at least in number of commits,” he wrote, before admitting he “made it unnecessarily hard for myself by being a grade A nincompoop and doing a system upgrade in the middle, and then having to chase down an issue that caused.”
Torvalds said the situation “was entirely on me.”
“I knew I shouldn’t have done it, but I just naively went ‘nothing will go wrong.’ And hey, it was all good in the end, I just made this merge window harder for myself than I should have.”
