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[ARTICLE · art-14851] src=lwn.net pub= topic=artificial-intelligence verified=true sentiment=↓ negative

Kernel prepatch 7.1-rc5

Linux kernel maintainer Linus Torvalds released prepatch 7.1-rc5 on Sunday, expressing dissatisfaction with the volume of trivial driver fixes included at this late stage in the release cycle. Torvalds warned he will reject non-critical fixes going forward, noting that several of the submitted patches were generated by AI code review tools.

read1 min publishedMay 24, 2026

I'm not entirely happy about it - most of this is totally trivial stuff to random drivers, which obviously makes it all less scary, but at the same time I'm really not convinced the churn is worth it at rc5 time. These things are "fixes", sure, but at the same time a lot of them are simply so irrelevant that I think they'd be better off in a linux-next tree and get merged during the merge window.So I think I'll start being a bit more hardnosed about this kind of unnecessary churn this late in the game. We are supposed to look for regressions. Non-critical fixes to long-standing issues are simply not appropriate for this late in the release cycle.

End result: this is too big, and this is the heads-up that I'll be pushing back on pointless pull requests with fixes that just aren't that important. And yes, several of these series were triggered by AI code review.

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