Linus Torvalds has posted a series of ten patches for the Linux kernel that he worked on with the help of a large language model. He disclosed the tool use at the recently concluded Maintainers Summit before submitting the series for review on the LWN mailing list.
The patches target a longstanding problem in folio lookup. Folios are units of memory management in the kernel. The changes make the kernel recognize when a folio is "hot," meaning it is being accessed frequently, and hold off releasing it until after an RCU grace period. RCU, or read-copy-update, is a kernel synchronization mechanism that lets readers access data without taking locks.
The series does more than speed up the lookup itself. It also moves the actual folio data accesses under RCU protection. On the fast path, the kernel can read the data directly from the folio inside an RCU-protected region, without taking a reference count, as long as the user-space copy does not trigger a page fault.
The results are significant. According to the series description, the changes deliver an order-of-magnitude speedup on a read()-heavy benchmark. That is a large gain for a kernel change of this size.
The work is not finished. Reviewers have already found a race condition in the code, and the author will need to address it before the changes can move forward. The LWN article that reported the series noted that the site was under heavy scraper load, which had suppressed comment display for anonymous users.
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