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By Jonathan Corbet
August 17, 2026
There were 16,418 non-merge commits brought into the mainline for the 7.2 release, exceeding the (already busy) 7.1 release; it is, in fact, the second-busiest publish in the kernel's history. Only the 6.7 release brought in additional commits but, while 6.7 was dominated by the merging of the bcachefs betterment history, the volume for 7.2 is additional broad-based.
These commits were contributed by 2,652 developers, a big increase over the former document (2,479 in 7.1). If one looks at the former of developer involvement since the commencement of the Git era, the outcome is:
![[Line storyline of developers per release]](https://static.lwn.net/images/2026/developer-plot-7.2.svg)
(This plot, akin much of the data here, comes from the subscriber-only LWN Kernel Source Database). There has been a clear trend complete that complete history: the figure of developers contributing to each publish increases complete time. But the incline of that row has clearly changed.
The most energetic developers operating on 7.2 were:
Most energetic 7.2 developers
By changesets Uwe Kleine-König 151 0.9% Rosen Penev 146 0.9% Ian Rogers 138 0.8% Johan Hovold 133 0.8% Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo 131 0.8% Chuck Lever 129 0.8% Eric Dumazet 121 0.7% Ville Syrjälä 115 0.7% Johannes Berg 112 0.7% Krzysztof Kozlowski 110 0.7% Thorsten Blum 108 0.7% Namjae Jeon 106 0.6% Christoph Hellwig 104 0.6% Sean Christopherson 100 0.6% Jakub Kicinski 96 0.6% SJ Park 94 0.6% Mike Rapoport 91 0.6% Dmitry Baryshkov 87 0.5% Eric Biggers 86 0.5% Rafael J. Wysocki 78 0.5%
By changed lines Matthew Stewart 83587 8.4% Hawking Zhang 62893 6.3% Miguel Ojeda 38979 3.9% Ian Rogers 31949 3.2% Darren Ye 20843 2.1% Ethan Nelson-Moore 16893 1.7% Harry Wentland 15233 1.5% Uwe Kleine-König 13803 1.4% Ingo Molnar 13649 1.4% Chuck Lever 10172 1.0% Eric Biggers 10067 1.0% Jakub Kicinski 9449 0.9% Rodrigo Siqueira 7749 0.8% Johannes Berg 7110 0.7% Arnd Bergmann 7085 0.7% Emil Tsalapatis 6810 0.7% Vivek Aknurwar 6544 0.7% Rob Clark 6490 0.6% Sabrina Dubroca 6401 0.6% Svyatoslav Ryhel 6072 0.6%
Uwe Kleine-König [KSDB] was the biggest contributor of commits to the 7.2 publish alongside cleanups through the controller subsystem. Rosen Penev [KSDB] contributed a long list of LLM-authored bug fixes throughout the architecture-specific, driver, networking, and crypto subsystems, among others. Ian Rogers [KSDB] worked extensively on the user-space perf tool, as did Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo [KSDB]. Johan Hovold [KSDB] made numerous improvements, mostly in the SPI and USB subsystems.
Matthew Stewart [KSDB] reached the top of the lines-changed pillar by following the time-honored tradition of adding additional massive, machine-generated amdgpu header files; Hawking Zhang [KSDB] did likewise. Miguel Ojeda [KSDB] brought the Rust zerocopy crate into the kernel source. Darren Ye [KSDB] added the MediaTek mt8196 sound driver.
Just complete 8% of the commits in 7.2 carried Tested-by tags, during 48% included Reviewed-by tags. The assessment tags, in particular, are showing a mild downward trend in latest releases:
![[Reviewed-by tags per release]](https://static.lwn.net/images/2026/review-tags-7.2.svg)
Whether that decrease reflects an genuine decrease in the amount of review taking location is unclear at best. In any case the most energetic testers and reviews for this sequence were:
Test and assessment credits in 7.2
Tested-by Dan Wheeler 117 7.0% Luiz Capitulino 54 3.2% James Clark 44 2.6% Sarthak Sharma 44 2.6% Venkat Rao Bagalkote 32 1.9% Tommaso Merciai 27 1.6% David Riley 27 1.6% Jie Gan 27 1.6% Geert Uytterhoeven 25 1.5% Arthur Kiyanovski 25 1.5% Marek Szyprowski 25 1.5% Randy Dunlap 24 1.4% Shivaprasad G Bhat 24 1.4% Rinitha S 21 1.3% Vitaly Prosyak 20 1.2%
Reviewed-by Konrad Dybcio 231 2.2% Dmitry Baryshkov 225 2.1% Andy Shevchenko 175 1.7% Geert Uytterhoeven 171 1.6% Krzysztof Kozlowski 152 1.5% Frank Li 147 1.4% Ilpo Järvinen 145 1.4% Christoph Hellwig 143 1.4% Jan Kara 121 1.2% Christian König 120 1.1% Linus Walleij 116 1.1% Alex Deucher 105 1.0% Simon Horman 102 1.0% Jeff Layton 101 1.0% Ido Schimmel 94 0.9%
Dan Wheeler [KSDB] is, as always, the top tester by morality of his activity alongside AMD graphics-driver patches. On the assessment side, Konrad Dybcio [KSDB] added his tag to 231 changes during Dmitry Baryshkov [KSDB] tagged 225; the identical two, who the two lean to concentration on drivers and devicetree files for Qualcomm devices, were at the top of that catalog for the 7.1 sequence as well.
Work on the 7.2 kernel was supported by 249 employers that we were capable to identify; the most energetic of those were:
Most energetic 7.2 employers
By changesets (Unknown) 2743 16.7% Intel 1512 9.2% 1191 7.3% Red Hat 873 5.3% AMD 813 5.0% Qualcomm 767 4.7% (None) 743 4.5% NVIDIA 535 3.3% Meta 441 2.7% (Consultant) 429 2.6% SUSE 358 2.2% Renesas Electronics 328 2.0% IBM 307 1.9% Kylin 278 1.7% NXP Semiconductors 264 1.6% Oracle 245 1.5% Arm 222 1.4% BayLibre 203 1.2% Microsoft 201 1.2% Bootlin 194 1.2%
By lines changed AMD 224121 22.4% (Unknown) 103861 10.4% 102565 10.3% Qualcomm 59021 5.9% Intel 53661 5.4% Red Hat 51559 5.2% Meta 38635 3.9% (None) 28218 2.8% NVIDIA 27417 2.7% MediaTek 22025 2.2% NXP Semiconductors 17692 1.8% BayLibre 15972 1.6% Oracle 12233 1.2% Microsoft 11786 1.2% Renesas Electronics 11103 1.1% Linaro 10209 1.0% (Consultant) 9362 0.9% IBM 9205 0.9% Texas Instruments 8398 0.8% SUSE 8350 0.8%
The most important alter this period around, arguably, is the significant increase in developers alongside unidentified affiliation. This is partially, at least, a consideration of the ongoing flood of new developers entering the kernel community.
New developers and their tools
Each of the former two kernel releases had set a document for the figure of first-time developers contributing changes; 7.2 has damaged that record again, alongside 613 contributors [KSDB] who had not been seen here before. Here, formerly again, the trend is clear:
![[First-time developers by release]](https://static.lwn.net/images/2026/first-timers-7.2.svg)
The most energetic new developer was Bryam Vargas [KSDB], who contributed 43 commits fixing problems in the input, NVMe, F2FS, AppArmor, Landlock, SELinux, NTFS, WiFi, ATA, SCSI, networking, Ceph, and Thunderbolt subsystems, among others. As has been observed current before, it would be difficult for a experienced kernel developer to attain deeply into that many subsystems complete the way of a sole betterment sequence — at least, if they wanted to comprehend what they are doing. For a earlier unknown developer to do this is amazing at best. Vargas's patches do not carry Assisted-by tags, though, so we are remaining to accept that this activity was done without LLM assistance.
Overall, 1,111 changes in 7.2 (under 7% of the total) carried Assisted-by tags — a important addition complete the 301 seen in 7.1. The real figure of LLM-assisted patches in 7.2 must certainly be far higher than that, though. Many developers do not provision those tags (often — but not always — out of ignorance of the rules), maintainers rarely ask concerning LLM use, and at smallest one maintainer actively strips those tags whenever applying patches. Accurately tracking commits developed with LLM aid may rotate out not to be possible, but it sometimes feels like the kernel community does not attention adequate to really try.
The another way in which LLM use is making itself felt in kernel development is in the area of place review. There are 252 patches in 7.2 alongside Reported-by tags crediting the Sashiko assessment system [KSDB]; 568 commits citation Sashiko in their changelogs. Other LLMs are also plainly being used to discover kernel bugs, though, alongside genuine effects.
The 7.2 publish contains 4,830 commits alongside Fixes tags, indicating that they fix a bug introduced by a former commit. To see fair how significant an addition is, regard this plot, an updated type of one that has been seen current before (most lately for the 6.17 betterment cycle):
The dense green row parcels how many commits in all publish contained Fixes tags, during the dense brown row is the figure of commits that were identified by Fixes tags in consequent commits. The crossover item is at 5.9, suggesting that, as of that release, the kernel community started fixing additional bugs than it introduced. That decision volition not hold, though; it volition obtain years for all of the post-5.9 bugs to be identified and fixed, and that row volition change as it happens.
The noteworthy part of the plot, though, is at the right-hand side, where the figure of commits carrying Fixes tags increases dramatically, after having been approximately flat for fairly a few releases. That, it seems, is what happens formerly ample numbers of group commencement turning LLMs toward the task of finding bugs in existing software. This is going to be an interesting trend to watch. The figure of bugs cannot be infinite — even in the kernel — so the charge of bug finding and fixing must eventually fall off. The existing bugs volition have been fixed, and LLM assessment volition have reduced the figure of new bugs introduced. At least, that is the hope.
If that drop-off does not happen, there volition be several interesting questions to answer. It seems fairly apparent that the dispersed of LLMs has enabled group to create kernel patches who would not have been capable of doing so before. If that is true, it is not much of a extend to conclude that, in many cases, the submitters of these patches do not fully understand what those patches do. Perhaps the LLMs are fine adequate that this understanding is no longer necessary, but it could additionally be that we are creating a heap of code that nobody has always really understood, but which will need to be maintained in the coming years.
The Linux kernel is aimed at manufacturing use, not investigation or experimentation. But there is currently a enormous test being run on the kernel's betterment processes and community. This community has absorbed new processes and tools many times complete its 35-year history, and will nearly certainly discover a way to do that this period as well. But that absorption has not continually been without turbulence alongside the way.
Meanwhile, there are nearly 14,000 non-merge changesets sitting in the linux-next repository and poised to be pulled for the 7.3 release; over 1,100 of them merge Assisted-by tags. It would appear that the elevated level of action that has characterized latest releases volition not be ending anytime soon. As always, keep an eye on LWN as we prosecute the next development sequence (and those that arrive after).
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