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 fro 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.
Yeah, I think you’re right. I think it’s also created a bunch of entitled paying customers, too, eg the ones that think screaming at front line employees is going to do dick all to help them. I’m happy to see more businesses in my area with signs saying they’ll kick out abusive customers and hope it becomes the norm.
The hilarious (because it’s so outrageous) part is they trained several generations that the customer is supposed to be the boss but then leave hired help to actually deal with those customers, including enforcing policies that go directly against customer wants. And then if someone manages to find their contact info to complain directly to them, they usually bend immediately because they don’t want to deal with them either. But they only bend for that specific case while all the other similar ones still get the previous policy.