• Linus Torvalds's first LLM-assisted patch series

    From LWN.net@1337:1/100 to All on Wed Oct 14 15:00:05 2026
    Linus Torvalds's first LLM-assisted patch series

    Date:
    Wed, 14 Oct 2026 13:50:29 +0000

    Description:
    At the recently concluded Maintainers
    Summit , Linus Torvalds said that he had been using a large language
    model to work on a patch series addressing a longstanding problem; he has
    now posted
    that series for review . The fairly short series of ten patches basically enhances folio
    lookup by noticing when folios are hot, and setting a "delay
    releasing this folio until after a RCU period", and then using that
    RCU delay it does not just the folio lookup itself under RCU (which
    we've done forever), but also the actual folio data accesses
    themselves under RCU. No refcount taking needed for the fastpath
    where we can just read the data from the folio entirely in an
    RCU-protected region when the user copy doesn't cause page faults.
    The end result is an order-of-magnitude speedup for a read() -heavy
    benchmark. Review has already identified a race
    condition in the code, though, so further work will be needed.

    ======================================================================
    Link to news story:
    https://lwn.net/Articles/1100449/


    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: tqwNet UK HUB @ hub.uk.erb.pw (1337:1/100)