Linux memory management expert Lorenzo Stoakes at Arm who has been contributing to the kernel since 2014 is stepping away from some reviewership roles within the Linux kernel due to all of the noise from the flood of kernel patches resulting from AI/LLMs.
Lorenzo announced today he is stepping away as a reviewer for the memory management (MM), core, misc, and Rust areas due to all the noise caused by AI. Lorenzo will continue serving as maintainer for areas of the kernel he oversees but is looking to lighten his load due to the increased patch burden in 2026.
Lorenzo commented in the patch series removing himself as reviewer for those areas of the kernel:
"Given the current throughput in the kernel resulting from AI-generated series, I unfortunately lack the bandwidth to generally be able to offer review except in those areas I maintain.
I have separated the patches into areas maintained by David, Andrew, and Alice + Danilo, so each can take the patches relevant to the subsystems, for convenience.
Apologies for doing this, but given the current trends I’d like to do something to make my inbox a little more manageable :)"
Lorenzo has been a longtime contributor to the Linux memory management code and also author of the book The Linux Memory Manager.
It’d b great if more people were to step up!
And I can only dream that companies setup some recurring donations to Linux and other FLOSS projects. We are all relying on these!!
Heck, not only the Internet but many technologies relied on volunteers! Most notably, ai itself, on so many levels (python ecosystem, and the training data from e.g. annas archive)
As long as donations and work are to the projects focused on pushing forward the general benefit, and not projects like omarchy which are meant to entrench Linux in corporate services and SaaS platforms on top of the fascist rhetoric and dog whistles.
Kudos for trying to maintain sanity.
This is a damn shame :(
