Another Linux kernel developer steps back from some duties due to overload
Arm's Lorenzo Stoakes isn't quitting Linux kernel development, though he's stepping back from some of the patch-review work he used to handle.
Stoakes is a principal software engineer at Arm and he's a busy chap. Aside from writing the forthcoming book The Linux Memory Manager, in his CV [PDF], he says:
"I hold four maintainerships: memory mapping, memory mapping (locking), memory mapping (madvise) - essentially the entirety of the userland API to memory management - and the reverse mapping which connects physical to virtual memory."
Even so, he plans to soon be doing a little less. Earlier this week he posted an email to the Linux kernel mailing list to say that he was planning to drop some of his workload.
He explained:
"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. [...] Apologies for doing this, but given the current trends I'd like to do something to make my inbox a little more manageable."
As it happens, this came just the day after the Paramount Penguin himself said that he saw signs that the AI patch tide was "starting to turn."
Stoakes told The Register:
"I am retaining my maintainerships and have no plans on giving those up, I just want my inbox to be less horrendous.
"And yeah, AI is part of the reason; in general, it's gone from 'once a week' to 'daily' to 'half of what I see in review'.
"But the AI wave is hitting [memory management] across the board, really."
He added:
"I have a habit of burning myself out over weekends and evenings - you can see my involvement on a thread talking about that here - which gives you a sense of my views if you read back through that thread."
At the Open Source Summit last month, the Reg FOSS desk joined the "Ask the Expert" session with Greg Kroah-Hartman, and he too expressed worrying sentiments:
"The onslaught of the LLM-generated patches... we don't have enough people to review them all... We need more reviewers. We don't have enough. All of the maintainers are burnt out, and we have been for ten years."
Kroah-Hartman also said:
"I want to go down to two Long Term Support releases - four, maximum. Six is too many. We're too busy. We don't have the manpower. It's crazy."
On Red Hat's model of offering 10 years of support for products with a given version of the kernel:
"Debian does it right. Debian and Yocto run the world. I've argued for years that the RHEL and SLES model is broken. That's why I don't work for SUSE any more." (R)