Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1106300/

Linus Torvalds has released the 7.4-rc2
prepatch and it will come as no surprise that it is a large one (“a
big -rc2 to go with the largest ever -rc1“). Much of the size was made
up of some automated Coccinelle updates that were spread out all over the
tree; once those are factored out, the rest looks fairly normal:

When masking that noise out from the diffstat, the shape of it changes
– not spread out over thousands of files any more. But it does not
look unusual: a third is drivers (gpu, networking and sound account
for most of it, but there’s a bit of everything), another third is
networking and bpf, and the final third is “the rest” (mostly
filesystems, mm, arch updates).

And yes, much of this was driven by various AI fixes. I think I’ll
stop repeating that, and we can just take it for granted. But this
time around Alexei [Starovoitov] claims that on the bpf side at least the fixes are
now coming in faster than the new reports, and that sounds lovely if
true.