Linus Torvalds to ‘start being more hardnosed’ about ‘pointless pull requests’ – some of which come from AIs

Summary

Operating Systems Linus Torvalds to ‘start being more hardnosed’ about ‘pointless pull requests’ – some of which come from AIs Warns large release candidates ‘are *not* conducive to long-term stability’ Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has signaled he’ll push back when he receives irrelevant pull requests, after complaining that developers are making badly timed and trivial submissions, sometimes after using AI to review code.Torvalds foreshadowed changes in his weekly state of the kernel update, which on Sunday announced the release of a fifth release candidate for version 7.1 of the Linux kernel.“To the surprise of absolutely nobody by now, rc5 is pretty big. Quite a bit bigger than rc5's have traditionally been,” Torvalds wrote, before revealing “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.” The Linux kernel development cycle usually sees Torvalds open a two-week window during which contributors submit code they hope will make it into the next release. Seven release candidates (rc1-7) follow, with each supposed to represent a step towards delivering a stable update. Revised code always arrives during that process. But high volumes of new contributions to rc5 add complexity at a time work on the new kernel is usually close to completion. “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,” Torvalds suggested. “And yes, several of these series were triggered by AI code review,” he wrote.“So I think I'll start being a bit more hardnosed about this kind of unnecessary churn this late in the game,” he added. “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.”He then declar...