3 stories
1,111 changes carry Assisted-by tags, up from 301 in 7.1, and 252 commits credit the Sashiko review system with the report. LWN says the surge in Fixes tags looks like people using LLMs to hunt bugs in old code.
Its worry: if the flood of patches continues, the kernel could end up with code nobody fully understands.
The top HN threads: facts from the discussions, both sides, insider voices. Email, Telegram, or RSS.
strncpy was killed for 'counter-intuitive semantics' around NUL termination and wasteful zero-filling. The '360 patches' figure is 360 uses converted to safer calls, not 360 bugs.
The origin: it was written to copy 14-byte, zero-padded-but-not-terminated filenames out of early UNIX directory entries. It was never meant for strings.
Linux 7.1 ships a rewritten in-kernel NTFS driver with real write performance, an Apple SMC battery driver for Asahi MacBooks, and early Intel Nova Lake and AMD graphics enablement. It also deletes over 140,000 lines: ISDN, PCMCIA controllers, i486-era subarchitectures.
The motive for some of those removals is new: AI-assisted bug reporting was generating noise against drivers for obsolete hardware, so the maintainers simply removed the targets.