Linux kernel maintainer crashes! AI floods with 10 vulnerability reports every day, making it hard to even catch a break

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（Source: Qbit）

Linux kernel maintainers have crashed.

Now, the speed at which AI finds bugs is faster than how quickly they fix them.

After finally spending overtime to clear the mines and then sleeping—

When I wake up, my inbox is packed again with a whole new batch of vulnerability reports.

The most messing-with-your-mind part is that these AI-generated reports are, in fact, mostly still correct. There’s no excuse to slack off. And what’s more, the submitter is a “cyber supervisor” who doesn’t need to sleep.

Can’t get it all done—there’s just no way you can finish the work.

Who would’ve thought—AI would become a cyber horsewhip for Linux developers.

But what else can you do?

Since the vulnerabilities are right here, you can’t just pretend nothing’s wrong and wait for hackers to “steal the house,” can you?

You can only grit your teeth and stay up all night to fix it.

In the end, this maintainer can only helplessly throw up their hands: there’s nothing anyone can do in the short term. He urges fellow maintainers to get mentally prepared—everyone will have to take it together.

This isn’t just one maintainer’s solitary sadness.

“A few months ago, we received some AI-generated low-quality security reports,” Linux kernel leader Greg Kroah-Hartman recalled. “At the time, we didn’t even take it seriously.”

At first, people thought it was just another pile of garbage generated by AI.

Who would’ve thought that overnight, AI would transform itself into a top-tier white-hat hacker?

All kinds of AI reports are bombarding inboxes, and with extremely high accuracy—

Open one email, and hey, what it says actually makes a lot of sense.

Look at the next one, and hey, how is what it says also correct??

Then your eyes go dark—starting an endless patching marathon…

The point of singularity arrived too suddenly—even kernel heavyweight Greg felt at a loss:

Greg said that security teams across major open-source projects communicate very frequently behind the scenes. He stated clearly: “All open-source security teams are currently going through this.”

They still haven’t come back to their senses—so which new AI tool just debuted out of nowhere?

Or did people suddenly collectively tap into their subconscious, and hit themselves on the forehead in unison:

“Hey, digging for vulnerabilities with AI sounds kind of interesting. Let’s all try it.”

No matter what the reason is, one fact is certain—

The tsunami has truly arrived.

Linux developers can’t take it anymore!

On LWN.net, a Linux kernel maintainer with the username wtarreau posted his “moment of collapse.”

The surge in the number of reports is just the surface.

What really makes his scalp tingle is that every day he can see “sights” he’d never seen before, repeatedly playing out:

Two different people submit the same vulnerability report

You have to know that in the past, to find security vulnerabilities usually required a fairly high technical bar, and a report would often be produced through deep manual analysis.

This also means that each person’s way of thinking is different, and everyone would head in different directions.

In such a huge codebase like Linux, repeatedly discovering the same vulnerability?

The odds are basically lower than winning the lottery.

The only explanation is that now a huge number of people who weren’t originally working on security are starting to use AI to find vulnerabilities.

And they’re doing it enthusiastically.

This instantly exploded wtarreau’s workload, forcing him to expand the team and bring people in to help.

But wtarreau didn’t say he was complaining. Instead, he said it’s a “happy kind of hassle.”

However, if you think about it the other way around, maybe it’s actually a good thing.

This makes wtarreau recall the golden age before 2000—that was the era that security maintainers were always dreaming of.

Back then, the internet wasn’t widespread, so you couldn’t patch online via OTA like you do now.

Software had to be burned onto CDs or written onto millions of floppy disks for distribution; if there were any serious security vulnerabilities in that software… it was basically all over.

So back then, the software had to stand up to thousands of rounds of scrutiny.

Nowadays, the software industry may be forced by AI to pick up those “abnormal” quality-assurance standards again.

The “release it and walk away” model simply doesn’t work anymore.

Every piece of software is now a live target.

The ban mechanisms no longer work. If a vendor finds a vulnerability, they can no longer hide behind an excuse like “we’ll keep it to ourselves.”

After all, even if someone tells the vendor in advance, who can guarantee that a bad actor won’t also use AI to find the same issue and then attack users?

So once a bug is reported, maintainers must fix it immediately.

Regarding this, wtarreau said he’s genuinely excited.

Even though it sounds a bit scary and it’s definitely tiring, software quality could see an unprecedented leap.

However, for this kind of “happy kind of hassle,” some netizens say they can’t relate at all.

He directly said that these Linux developers are just congratulating themselves. Some flaws genuinely don’t get cared about by anyone, and blindly upgrading can instead bring about compatibility disasters.

Therefore, he advises maintainers to focus their attention—don’t change things just because AI says to. Just make sure the most serious system-level vulnerabilities are tightly controlled.

About this viewpoint, another netizen was equally blunt: that’s completely nonsense—just a bunch of excuses.

But perhaps there’s an even more realistic problem here—

“Happy kind of hassle” might be too beautiful. Who can guarantee that this won’t become an unprecedented security hell?

Can maintainers’ speed in fixing bugs truly beat the speed of criminals using AI to dig for vulnerabilities?

But actually, it’s fine—if you can’t beat them, join them.

Right now, AI in Linux kernel development is still mostly auxiliary and hasn’t officially written complete code yet.

But now, that boundary is becoming increasingly blurry.

Even kernel boss Greg has already started experimenting with AI.

Sure, these patches still need to be manually cleaned up a bit, with neat commit messages, and then integrated—but they absolutely can’t be called “AI garbage.”

“These tools are useful,” Greg said candidly. “We can’t pretend not to see. They really are here, and they’re only getting stronger.”

Developers are also being very honest about their bodies. “We’ve already seen some patches that are indeed generated by AI,” Greg added.

And the biggest advantage of doing so is response speed.

Greg mentioned that now we have lots of robots watching the patches to check them.

If the check doesn’t pass, developers can quickly receive an answer, and provide feedback: “Okay, then I’ll submit another version tomorrow.”

This way, the speed of patching can be brought in line with the speed at which AI digs for bugs.

For Linux, the relationship with AI is already a question they have to think about.

It’s both an opportunity and a challenge.

On one hand, AI brings new sources of vulnerabilities and increases the burden of manual review.

But on the other hand, AI is also helping ease that pressure.

Perhaps what Linux kernel maintainers are facing right now is a snapshot of the whole panorama of this AI revolution.

AI is developing fast, and this development is forcing us to embrace it.

Fasten your seatbelts.

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