---
title: "Linus Torvalds says Linux 7.4-rc1 is a big merge window of almost 20,000 commits, full of AI-found fixes"
url: https://badiyaa.com/linus-torvalds-linux-74-ai-fixes/
published: 2026-11-12T01:45:00+00:00
modified: 2026-11-12T01:45:00+00:00
section: Tech
publisher: Badiyaa
---

# Linus Torvalds says Linux 7.4-rc1 is a big merge window of almost 20,000 commits, full of AI-found fixes

Linus Torvalds says Linux 7.4-rc1 brought almost 20,000 commits, against a usual 15,000, and is full of fixes for issues found by AI tools.

Linus Torvalds has called the newest Linux kernel merge window “BIG,” with almost 20,000 commits, and he puts much of that growth down to work triggered by AI tools. In his announcement of Linux 7.4-rc1 on November 1, the Linux creator said the release is “full of fixes for issues found by AI,” and that he sees the timing of those fixes as good news.

A typical merge window, the two-week stretch when new code is accepted, brings in about 15,000 commits, Torvalds wrote. This one came close to 20,000. Even the summary is outsized: the shortlog alone runs to 24,000 lines and 1.2 MB, so he left it out of the email.

## Why Torvalds is pleased, not worried

The key line is about when the AI work lands. Torvalds wrote that he is “*much* happier with the flood of AI triggered work going into the merge window than it showing up mainly as extra fixes during the -rc period.” The -rc weeks that follow rc1 are meant for stabilizing the release, not absorbing large waves of new patches.

His hope, in his words, is that AI fixes “are becoming more part of the ‘normal development'” rather than a late surge. “I think that’s a much healthier model. But we’ll see how the -rc’s look,” he added.

He also described how the patches arrive. More and more of them, he wrote, “have been suggested by AI too, although they often get rewritten.” In other words, AI tools are finding bugs and proposing code, while kernel developers still rework what goes in.

## It is not only AI

Torvalds offered a second reason for the size. Developers may be “expecting 7.4 to be the next LTS release,” he wrote, meaning a long-term support kernel that companies and distributions keep running for years. Maintainers tend to push more work into a release they expect to last. “So it may not *just* be the flood of AI patches,” he said.

The raw diff is swollen for an older reason, too. A full third of the patch is AMD graphics register definitions dumped into header files, which Torvalds told readers to treat as noise. Without that, about half the changes are drivers; counting it, drivers make up roughly two-thirds. The rest is spread across architecture code, filesystems, tooling such as perf and selftests, and core areas including networking, Rust, BPF and memory management.

## The numbers, worked out

Going from a usual 15,000 commits to nearly 20,000 is a jump of about 5,000, or roughly a third more than normal. Over a 14-day merge window, 20,000 commits works out to about 1,430 commits merged per day. The earlier 7.3-rc1, released on August 30, was already big; in that announcement Torvalds said it was “certainly up there” for commit count, and that an AMD GPU dump made up about a third of the patch then as well.

## What happens next

Release candidates now follow weekly, normally for seven or eight weeks, before the final Linux 7.4. Torvalds also said two pull requests were still in his inbox at rc1 and might land in rc2.

AI’s role in software keeps showing up in our coverage, from [Sergey Brin saying Gemini models now help build their own successors](https://badiyaa.com/sergey-brin-gemini-rsi-treadmill-argon/) to a lighter Linux story about [a script that emails Sam Altman about unused RAM on Linux PCs](https://badiyaa.com/ram-altman-script-email-sam-altman-unused-ram/).

The test for Torvalds’s “healthier model” comes in the rc weeks: if AI fixes stay small after rc1, the bet has paid off.

*Image: Krd, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons*

*This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*