#LinusTorvalds managed to fix a really nasty #Linux #kernel Intel GPU driver bug he was plagued with[1] using #AI, which "enormously helped by doing much of the grunt-work" – but he needed persistence and multiple debug patches as well, as the AI multiple times had told him to give up and just report the bug.

To quote https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/c/818bebeb63dd6bf5f4e07e145f6cdbace520a34c:

""And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.

I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.

I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am.

But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above.

This is basically a one-liner fixing a bogus "round_up()" to a "round_down()", but there were 24 patches adding more and more debug information to this, and 18 kernel boot to finally narrow it down to this.""

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAHk-%3DwjJJH-1q6TK45%[email protected]/t/#u

#LinuxKernel

Anyone any trouble with the #Linux #kernel's guide on "How to verify bugs and bisect regressions"[1]?

Then let me know, I spotted a few minor issues and started preparing a patch.

Would also be cool if…

* …some #ArchLinux user could check if the additional steps needed are still required or if "make install" suffices there thse days

* …some #Debian user could check if CONFIG_SYSTEM_TRUSTED_KEYS still points to an unshipped file and thus needs to be adjusted[2].

[1] https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/verify-bugs-and-bisect-regressions.html

[2] https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/verify-bugs-and-bisect-regressions.html#configmods-distros-bisref #LinuxKernel

Linus removed #bcachefs from mainline, it thus will be gone as of #Linux 6.18:

https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/c/f2c61db29f277b9c80de92102fc532cc247495cd

""bcachefs was marked 'externally maintained' in 6.17 but the code remained to make the transition smoother.

It's now a DKMS module, making the in-kernel code stale, so remove it to avoid any version confusion.""

284 files changed, 0 insertions, 117483 deletions

#kernel #LinuxKernel

Dmitry Brant: Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver

https://dmitrybrant.com/2025/09/07/using-claude-code-to-modernize-a-25-year-old-kernel-driver

"[…] one of my hobbies is helping people recover data from old tape cartridges, such as QIC-80 tapes, which were a rather popular backup medium in the 1990s among individuals […]

Whenever I receive a QIC-80 tape for recovery, I power up one of my older PC workstations which has the appropriate tape drive attached to it, and boot into a very old version of #Linux (namely CentOS 3.5), because this is the only way to use the ftape driver, which is the #kernel driver necessary for communicating with this tape drive, allowing the user to dump the binary contents of the tape. […]

The trouble is, the ftape driver hasn’t been supported since roughly the year 2000, and was soon removed from the #LinuxKernel for this reason. This is why I’ve needed to run a painfully old version of Linux anytime I have to work with one of these drives. It would be great if ftape worked on a modern distro, with all the benefits and affordances that would provide.

So a couple of weeks ago, it occurred to me to make a simple request to Claude Code: […]"

#Linux 6.16.2 and 6.12.43 are out.

And 6.15.11, too, but note:

""Note, this is the LAST 6.15.y kernel release, this branch is now end-of-life. Please move to the 6.16.y kernel branch at this point in time.""

https://lore.kernel.org/all/2025082012-jingling-alarm-7380@gregkh/

#kernel #LinuxKernel

#Git 2.51 is out:

https://github.blog/open-source/git/highlights-from-git-2-51/

https://lore.kernel.org/all/[email protected]/

A few quotes from the former URL:

Cruft-free multi-pack indexes […] Using this at GitHub has allowed us to write significantly smaller MIDXs, in a fraction of the time, and resulting in faster repository read performance overall.

Smaller packs with path walk […] As a result, Git can generate packs using the path walk approach that are often significantly smaller

[…] Git 2.51 introduces a variant of the internal stash representation that allows multiple stash entries to be represented as a sequence of commits. […]

[…] git switch and git restore […] are no longer considered experimental […]

[…] git whatchanged […] is now marked as deprecated with eventual plans to remove it in Git 3.0. […]

Speaking of Git 3.0, this release saw a few more entries added to the BreakingChanges list (https://github.com/git/git/blob/v2.51.0/Documentation/BreakingChanges.adoc ). […]

[…] this release saw an update to Git’s guidelines on submitting patches, which have historically required contributions to be non-anonymous, and submitted under a contributor’s legal name. Git now aligns more closely with the Linux kernel’s approach, to permit submitting patches with an identity other than the contributor’s legal name. […]

Linus QOTD from a recent #Linux #kernel merge commit:

""I am on a mission to write out the more obscure TLAs in order to keep track of them.

Because while math tells us that there are only about 17k different combinations of three-letter acronyms using English letters (26^3), I am convinced that somehow Intel, AMD and ARM have together figured out new mathematics, and have at least a million different TLAs that they use.""

https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/c/20e0d8576484c60c8c0c9d5d6665541c37dee327 #LinuxKernel

PSA: never write "broken in #linux 6.15.3 and later"; instead specify which later versions you tested and turned out to be affected, too.

That will enable people that look into the bug to immediately see if it might be a 6.15.y specific problem or affects newer stable series (e.g. 6.16.y) as well?

It's also important to to determine if the problem only affected stable trees, or occurs in mainline (e.g. 6.17-rc1), too – which is important, as for the #kernel it often determines who is responsible.

Not to mention that "and later" becomes wrong once the issue is fixed. 😆

#LinuxKernel

Linus still did neither remove bcachefs from #Linux #kernel nor pulled the updates for 6.17 Kent submitted.

The latter meanwhile wrote a few mails to #LKML which in diplomatic phrases might be called "not really helpful", like this one https://lore.kernel.org/all/3ik3h6hfm4v2y3rtpjshk5y4wlm5n366overw2lp72qk5izizw@k6vxp22uwnwa/

It resulted in a few good replies from respected developers that are worth a read if you are followed the topic, among them from Josef Bacik (https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250809192156.GA1411279@fedora/ ), Matthew Wilcox (https://lore.kernel.org/all/[email protected]/ ), Sasha Levin (https://lore.kernel.org/all/aJgaiFS3aAEEd78W@lappy/ ) and Theodore Ts'o (https://lore.kernel.org/all/[email protected]/ & https://lore.kernel.org/all/[email protected]/).

#Linux 6.16 is out: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wh0kuQE+tWMEPJqCR48F4Tip2EeYQU-mi+2Fx_Oa1Ehbw@mail.gmail.com/

For a list of highlights see https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_6.16 as well as https://lwn.net/Articles/1031534/, https://lwn.net/Articles/1022512/ and https://lwn.net/Articles/1023075/ .

#Kernel #LinuxKernel

Remember #Linux' pktcdvd driver, which allowed direct mounts with UDF of cd-rw drives that required 32kb packets?

That driver is now in now scheduled to be removed with #kernel 6.17, as a patch doing this landed in linux-next today – because that use-case is uncommon these days, as "the world has moved on from those kinds of media. To make matters worse, it's actively breaking setups where it's not even required or useful."

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/next/linux-next.git/commit/?id=1cea5180f2f812c444ceebdc40f5d001bedd030d

#LinuxKernel