The Kernel's Reviewer Problem: Lorenzo Stoakes Steps Back From the AI Patch Flood

Yesterday Asahi Linux relicensed every repository from MIT to GPL to fight AI code theft. Today the other shoe dropped, and it landed on a person. Lorenzo Stoakes, an Arm engineer who has worked on the Linux kernel's memory management code for over a decade, announced he is stepping down as a reviewer for the MM, core, misc, and Rust areas. His reason was not a new job, a falling out, or burnout in the usual sense. It was volume. AI-generated patch series have flooded the kernel mailing list past the point where one human can keep up. A maintainer with rare credentials Stoakes is not a drive-by contributor. He has worked on kernel memory management since 2014, is employed by Arm, and wrote the book on the subject, literally: The Linux Memory Manager. He reviewed patches across four areas, which made him one of the load-bearing walls of the subsystem that decides how the kernel hands out memory, the code everything else stands on. He is keeping the maintainer roles he already holds. What he is dropping is the extra review work, the unpaid reading of other people's patches that keeps bad code out. The flood has a paper trail This did not come out of nowhere. In April the kernel publi...