TheModelDesk

At the Maintainers Summit that ended shortly before October 14, 2026, Linus Torvalds said he had used a large language model on a longstanding Linux problem. He has now submitted the resulting series for review. LWN describes it as his first LLM-assisted patch series and says it contains ten patches.

The changes target folio lookup. When a folio is hot, the code can postpone its release until an RCU period has passed. That protection then covers the folio’s data reads as well as the lookup, which has long run under RCU. The fast path can read the data inside the RCU-protected section without taking a reference count when copying to the user does not cause a page fault. A read-heavy benchmark became an order of magnitude faster. Reviewers have already found a race condition, so the series still needs more work.