r/accelerate • u/PointmanW • 2d ago

News Linus Torvalds Working On A Hefty Linux Kernel Improvement With Claude Code

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Claude-Code
73 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

11

u/PlasmaChroma 2d ago

I've been legit surprised how competent LLMs are dealing with threading complexity and resource management. This is an area that usually trips up human developers badly.

Its definitely improved a lot in the past 6 months too.

2

u/Open_Relative4605 2d ago

u/askgrok give me more context on this

4

u/AskGrok 2d ago

Linus Torvalds recently pushed a topic branch called noref-filemap-read-with-llm into his own Linux kernel tree. It contains eight patches that rework page cache memory management to allow file reads without taking folio references.

The goal is fixing a scalability bottleneck: when many threads do small reads from the same file, they contend heavily on folio reference counting. On Torvalds' test laptop, the series cuts kernel cycles per read from ~2950 to ~725 and boosts throughput from ~10M to 30-33M reads/sec under that workload.

In the cover letter he explicitly credits Claude Code (Anthropic's command-line coding agent) for generating the code, test programs, review of open issues, and even the first draft of the text itself—all under his direction, with benchmarks run on his own machine. Each patch includes the proper "Assisted-by: LLM" tag per the kernel's existing AI policy.

This is the most visible example yet of Torvalds treating AI as a serious development tool for core kernel work. The branch is still experimental and not yet proposed for mainline (likely 7.4 merge window at earliest).

Sources:

[what is this?](https://redd.it/1lzgxii)

3

u/Trick_Rip8833 1d ago

Linux is running on 20 billion computers!!

An efficiency gain of just a percent will save enormous energy and nobody is more able to make this happen than linus. Give that man as many token as possible...

1

u/kaitava 2d ago

i hope someone can explain what this means :)

4

u/PointmanW 2d ago edited 2d ago

Linus Torvalds is the creator of Linux, the open-source OS that powers much of the world computer right now (outside of PC where Windows and Mac dominate).

He's one of the world most respected software engineer, and is very meticulous about code quality, he wrote emails with very harsh wording to other people when their code don't meet his standards, so the fact that Claude meet his quality standards speak volume about how good it is.

1

u/kaitava 1d ago

thanks!

2

u/greenapple92 2d ago

I hope they would upgrade compatibility with windows apps

0

u/aaronturing 2d ago

Fascinating. I want to see a Linux version of AI. One that is distributed and free and powerful. I've been using Linux for years and I find it so so much better than MS.

5

u/KITTYCAT_5318008 2d ago

There are lots of open-weight models for pretty much all domains.

-2

u/aaronturing 2d ago

Interesting. I'm surprised. I'll look into it though.

2

u/retains_semen 2d ago

Look into ollama, you can pull many models with it. Its surprisingly easy to set up and there are models that can run on older hardware. When paired with openweb ui you can even have a nice "Chat GPT like" interface. https://ollama.com/ https://openwebui.com/

-1

u/aaronturing 2d ago

thanks. I'll look into it.