Linux 7.3 Networking Maintainers: “Completely Buried” in AI Patches

All of the networking subsystem updates have been accepted into the Linux 7.3 kernel merge window. Alongside numerous improvements for wired and wireless networking, the cycle brought a huge number of bug fixes — including frankly minor ones generated by AI agents built on large language models. The subsystem maintainers openly admit that they've been left “completely buried.”

Maintainer Jakub Kicinski notes that he and Paolo accepted a comparable number of patches in the net (632) and net-next (648) branches, with between a third and a half of the net-next changes looking like low-priority AI fixes, cleanups and clarifications. In his words, the flow never stops: over recent weeks and months developers have been literally showered with patches, and to reduce the noise, old networking code and drivers that hardly anyone is likely to use on modern systems are being thrown out of the kernel.

Fighting fire with fire

The response to the AI invasion turned out to be paradoxical: the developers decided to lean into AI more heavily themselves. As Kicinski writes, the team managed to secure enough budget and access to language models — for which he thanks Meta — to run every patch through several cutting-edge models. This weeds out some of the hallucinations, though the reach of such review is limited. Curiously, the stream of machine-generated fixes exposed a long-standing problem: the networking subsystem's APIs, especially those for rare events like PCIe errors and timeouts, have always been prone to races, and now the AI won't let that be ignored.

For the next release Kicinski plans to offload the routine work onto the models: patchwork management, automatic replies to standard procedural comments, editing commit messages and, possibly, applying patches that have already received a “reviewed-by” tag from trusted people.

What's new in networking

Among the cycle's technical novelties are BIG TCP support in UDP tunnels for the VXLAN and Geneve drivers, improved handling of extreme memory pressure in MPTCP, and other core changes. For wired networking, initial CXL support has been added for AMD/Solarflare network cards, along with the skeleton of the new Intel iXD driver (for the Control Plane PIC Function in the Intel E2100 and subsequent IPUs/FNICs), as well as firmware for AMD Pensando cards.

On the wireless side, Multi-Link Operation mechanisms continue to develop, an mm81x driver has appeared for long-range Morse Micro S1G devices, a new NXPWIFI driver for NXP devices, while MediaTek's MT76 gained support for the MT7928 and NAN for the MT7925.

Source: Phoronix