Linux creator ships his first AI-assisted kernel patch, boosting read speed 3x

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has pushed a new dev branch called noref-filemap-read-with-llm in his personal Git repo, submitting his first kernel patch series built with help from a large language model. The code, tests, and docs were all drafted with Anthropic's AI coding tool Claude Code.

The patch tackles a memory management bottleneck: when many threads read the same file at high speed, constant updates to page cache reference counts cause race contention across CPU cores. In tests with 8 threads reading one file, read throughput jumped from about 10 million to over 30 million ops per second, and kernel cycles per read fell from around 2950 to 725.

The patch is still experimental and not yet merged into the Linux 7.4 mainline. Torvalds has also recently used AI models to refactor old code, uncovering 3 hidden bugs that had lurked in Linux for 13 years.