Linus Torvalds said in his weekly kernel update that the second release candidate of Linux 7.4 is a big one, and he relayed a developer’s claim that bug fixes in one part of the kernel are now arriving faster than new bug reports, according to The Register, which reported it on November 9, 2026.

What Torvalds wrote

  • The Register says Torvalds announced Linux 7.4-rc2 in his weekly post and called it big for two reasons. He had left some code out of rc1 because he was busy, and that release was already the largest in the kernel’s history. The release also contained “various AI fixes,” according to the report.
  • He relayed a claim from Alexei Starovoitov, the co-creator and lead developer of eBPF, that on the BPF side “the fixes are now coming in faster than the new reports.” Torvalds said this “sounds lovely if true.”
  • According to The Register, Starovoitov said most other areas of the kernel have not reached that point, though it may signal that “the tide” is starting to turn, and advised people not to “hold your breath.”

Figures in the report

The Register says the Linux kernel is more than 40 million lines of code. It also cites vendor patch volumes: Microsoft fixed 974 flaws in September, a record and its third record-setting month this year, after 622 in July and 206 in June, and Oracle addressed 1,449 flaws in a single month. The article gives no counts of kernel patches or bug reports, and it describes the eBPF improvement only in qualitative terms.

What the report does not include

The article does not say how many of the rc2 fixes were found with AI tools, how many reports remain open in any subsystem, or whether the trend holds beyond the BPF code.

Sources and notes

This post is based on The Register’s article by Simon Sharwood, published November 9, 2026. The article links to Torvalds’s post, which Lens did not read, so his words are quoted as The Register reported them. Starovoitov’s claim is relayed by Torvalds and was not independently checked. Lens did not contact either developer.

Image: A close-up of a computer motherboard, by Lenharth Systems via Wikimedia Commons, released under CC0 1.0; cropped. Stand-in photo; it does not show the events described.