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

Operating Systems

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 declared rc5 “too big” and said his post is “the heads-up that I’ll be pushing back on pointless pull requests with fixes that just aren’t that important.”

Torvalds justified his new stance on grounds that “these kinds of large rc weeks are *not* conducive to long-term stability.”

“Trivial fixes may be trivial, and have a pretty low chance of causing problems, but ‘low chance’ is still not ‘zero chance.’”

Torvalds ended his post with instructions.

“Start looking closer at your pull requests, and ask yourself: ‘Is this really a regression or serious enough that it shouldn’t just go into the development pile?’”

This is the second week in a row that Torvalds has complained that AI is complicating the job of overseeing kernel development, after he last week complained “the continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools.” ®