THE ESSENTIALS IN 30 SECONDS

  • Linux 7.4-rc1 was released on November 1 after a merge window Torvalds put at almost 20,000 commits, described in coverage as a record.
  • A XenoSpectrum count found 3,008 commits carrying an Assisted-by tag in the 7.4 merge window, against 1,257 for 7.3, roughly 2.4 times more.
  • Torvalds prefers AI-driven fixes landing during the merge window over a flood of fixes in the release-candidate phase, while noting AI is not the only reason for the size.

Linus Torvalds released Linux 7.4-rc1 on November 1, closing the two-week merge window in which new code enters the kernel before several weeks of stabilization. In his announcement, as reported by XenoSpectrum and Joho no Todai on DEV Community, he put the window at almost 20,000 commits, which Joho no Todai describes as a record.

The numbers behind the merge window

Exact totals depend on how commits are counted. XenoSpectrum, which compared the v7.3 and v7.4-rc1 tags in the official repository, counts 19,780 commits including merges and 18,591 without them. Joho no Todai gives 19,671 and notes that recent merge windows typically sat around 15,000 commits. Torvalds also pointed out that about a third of the diff consists of AMD GPU register definitions, which inflate the line count without reflecting much new logic.

XenoSpectrum also counted commits whose messages contain an "Assisted-by:" line, the tag kernel developers use to disclose help from an AI tool. It found 3,008 such commits in the 7.4 merge window, about 16.2% of non-merge commits, compared with 1,257, or 8.2%, during the 7.3 window. That is roughly a 2.4-fold increase, and by its calculation tagged commits account for about half of the growth in non-merge commits. The publication stresses that the tag undercounts real AI use, since many developers do not add it.

Why Torvalds sees a better pattern

AI-tagged commits had been especially common during recent release-candidate weeks, when the kernel is supposed to settle down: XenoSpectrum measured 19.3% during the 7.3 rc period. This time, more of that work arrived during the merge window itself. Torvalds called this a "much healthier model" and said he hopes AI-generated fixes become part of regular development rather than piling into the stabilization phase. According to DEV Community, he added that AI-proposed patches are often rewritten by people before they land.

He was careful not to attribute the whole jump to AI. Expectations that 7.4 could become the next long-term support kernel may have encouraged maintainers to submit work early, he suggested. Neither the final release date nor an LTS designation has been confirmed.