Linus Torvalds Discusses Maintainers, AI, and Rust in the Kernel

ZDNet reports that 'At the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit Japan, Linus Torvalds and his good friend Dirk Hohndel, the head of Verizon open source, talked about the current state of Linux:

Speaking of maintainers, Hohndel brought up the question of 'maintainer fatigue and how draining and stressful this role is....' Torvalds replied, 'It's much easier to find developers; we have a lot of developers. Some people think that you have to be a superdeveloper who can do everything to be a maintainer, but that's not actually true....'

Hohndel commented that the aging of the kernel community is a 'double-edged sword.' Torvalds agreed, but he noted that 'one of the things I liked about the Rust side of the kernel, was that there was one maintainer who was clearly much younger than most of the maintainers. We can clearly see that certain areas in the kernel bring in more young people....'

Hohndel and Torvalds also talked about the use of the Rust language in the Linux kernel. Torvalds said, 'It's been growing, but we don't have any part of the kernel that really depends on Rust yet. To me, Rust was one of those things that made technical sense, but to me personally, even more important was that we need to not stagnate as a kernel and as developers.' That said, Torvalds continued, 'Rust has not really shown itself as the next great big thing. But I think during next year, we'll actually be starting to integrate drivers and some even major subsystems that are starting to use it actively. So it's one of those things that is going to take years before it's a big part of the kernel. But it's certainly shaping up to be one of those.'

Torvalds also said he enjoyed the fact that open source 'has become the standard within the industry.'

But later Hohndel, calling AI 'autocorrect on steroids,' asked Torvalds if he thought he'd ever see submissions of LLM-written code.

'I'm convinced it's gonna happen. And it may well be happening already, maybe on a smaller scale where people use it more to help write code.' But, unlike many people, Torvalds isn't too worried about AI. 'It's clearly something where automation has always helped people write code. This is not anything new at all....'

But, 'What about hallucinations?,' asked Hohndel. Torvalds, who will never stop being a little snarky, said, 'I see the bugs that happen without AI every day. So that's why I'm not so worried. I think we're doing just fine at making mistakes on our own.'

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