The Linux kernel has almost reached the meaning of life…in millions of lines of code. Containing nearly 20,000 commits, which is roughly 5k more than the average, it's become clear that the increase in size is partially due to AI.

“I think the reason is the by now obvious one, but I'm actually taking it as a good sign…" Linus Torvalds wrote in his latest state of the kernel message. He continues, "I'm *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.”

On Phoronix, Michael Larabel charted the rise of commits from the 3.1 kernel to the 7.4 kernel, and the increase is steady, as well as eye-opening. The 3.1 kernel had 7620 commits, whereas the 7.4 kernel contained 19,671.

To put this into perspective, kernel 7.3 was the first time a kernel breached 20k commits, but that was for the entire kernel development cycle. Kernel 7.4 hit that number during the merge window alone.

The number of commits also points to how overwhelmed the kernel developers are at the moment (again, thanks to AI). However, AI isn't the only reason for the most recent spate of commits. According to Torvalds, "a small part of the "this is a big merge window" may also be that people are expecting 7.4 to be the next LTS release, which is another independent reason why some releases tend larger than others. So it may not *just* be the flood of AI patches."

Kernel 7.4 is expected to be released in December.