Linux kernel maintainers say AI-generated patches have left them ‘completely overwhelmed’

The Linux 7.3 kernel's networking subsystem changes were merged into mainline on Thursday, August 20, bringing extended BIG TCP support for UDP tunnels, reduced global lock contention for routing updates, and new wireless drivers. But alongside the technical gains, networking maintainers sounded an alarm: they are "completely overwhelmed" by patches generated by AI and large language models.

BIG TCP Expands to Overlay Networks

The headline networking feature for Linux 7.3 is BIG TCP support in VXLAN and Geneve UDP tunnel drivers. BIG TCP allows the kernel's network stack to handle data chunks larger than 64 KiB internally before segmenting them for transmission, reducing per-packet overhead on high-speed links. Previously available only for direct routing in tools like Cilium, BIG TCP now extends to the overlay networks widely used in cloud and container environments.phoronix+1

Developer benchmarks included with the patches showed throughput improvements of roughly 10 to 15 percent for VXLAN and Geneve under standard MTU conditions, with gains reaching nearly 35 percent for VXLAN when hardware tunnel offload was disabled. The merge also includes work to reduce dependency on RTNL, a global lock that serializes network device configuration. FIB rule operations can now proceed in parallel across network namespaces, with a synthetic benchmark of 4,096 namespaces showing roughly 25x faster IPv4 rule insertion and 29x faster IPv6 insertion.xenospectrum

AI Patch Flood Strains Maintainers

Maintainer Jakub Kicinski wrote in the pull request that he and co-maintainer Paolo Abeni merged 632 patches into the net tree and 648 into net-next, estimating that one-third to one-half of the net-next patches appeared to be "AI-driven low priority fixes, cleanups and clarifications". "We are completely overwhelmed, of course," Kicinski wrote.phoronix+1

The maintainers' response has been to fight AI with AI. With token budget support from Meta ↗ 0.75%, the team now runs reviews of each incoming patch through multiple frontier models to catch hallucinations. Kicinski said the next step would be shifting routine work — managing patchwork, editing commit messages, and automating procedural feedback — to LLMs, while acknowledging that race conditions in rarely triggered code paths like PCIe error handlers "cannot be solved by LLMs alone".xenospectrum+1

New Drivers and Recovery Improvements

The merge window also introduced the mm81x driver for Morse Micro's Wi-Fi HaLow long-range devices, a new NXPWIFI driver for NXP hardware, and an initial skeleton for Intel's ↘ 2.24% iXD driver targeting E2100 and later infrastructure processing units. MPTCP received a change to prune its out-of-order queue under extreme memory pressure, and AF_UNIX gained improved error reporting for file descriptor rejections by Linux Security Modules. The first release candidate for Linux 7.3 is expected around August 30, with a stable release targeted for late October.techveda+2