Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE began the Linux 7.4 sound pull request by noting that “the AI flood continues” with there continuing to be a lot of new patches coming as a result of AI/LLM agents devising patches as well as uncovering new kernel bugs.
Takashi went on to explain that it was another busy cycle with changes in the sound subsystem from lots of core code hardening to new platforms and codecs as well. The core ALSA code has been hardened against some race conditions, there’s a buffer leak fix in the compression offload code, race fixes in the JACK code, and other race conditions and more typical C bug fixes. The OSS sequencer emulation code has also been marked as deprecated for Linux 7.4.
On the hardware side, the Linux 7.4 sound updates include support for compressed audio playback on SOF IPC4 with Intel Tigerlake and newer. There is also AMD ACP 7.0/7.F sound IP support with SoundWire and the PDM controller. The new AMD ACP 7.0/7.F IP appears for upcoming Ryzen Zen 6 platforms.
There are also quirks for many different Intel/AMD laptops from the likes of Lenovo, ASUS, HP, AAcer, HONOR, MSI, and others.
New codec drivers are for the ESS ES9039Q2M, Nuvoton NAU83G60 amplifier, Senary SN624x SoundWire SDCA codec.
Also new is the Qualcomm QAIF driver for their Shikra platform.
More details on the many sound changes for Linux 7.4 via this pull ( https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/87ecdgc246.wl-tiwai@suse.de/ ).
Am I the only person that thinks fixing kernel bugs discovered with AI is a good thing? Like… AI is out there, we can’t stop it now… People WILL use it, and using it to fix the bugs and even potential security vulnerabilities now, rather than letting a malicious actor do it sounds like something I’d very much like.
Even everyone saying Linus went full AI… Like… What? IMO he’s being practical. It IS a tool, and there ARE a lot of things it should not be used for, but using it to patch things before human verification happens is a pretty sensible thing to do. Its no different than a crappy programmer submitting code for verification. It’d be a problem if there were too many PRs to handle, which has happened with some projects, but the kernel seems to be doing just fine?
The bigger issues with AI IMO are the environmental ones. But that’s really a continuing trend from things like pushing computers around the world using Electron for no reason other than web developers being lazy and wanting to make an app without knowing anything but web dev. A whole-ass web browser is not needed for everything. Though I do admit AI has scaled this problem pretty astronomically…
Its also bad for creative endeavors. For the obvious reasons. I’m a game developer and I work with others who will sometimes try to code with AI and booooyyy do I give them an earful for that (its very noticeable, to those who think they’re clever and can hide it. Just learn to fucking program ffs, its a lot faster than asking someone to program for you and having to constantly correct them because you don’t understand wtf you’re doing).
Would love to hear from someone who has been programming for a long time and isn’t all just “AI bad because AI bad”. Personally I’ve been around since 2014 or so.
Am I the only person that thinks fixing kernel bugs discovered with AI is a good thing?
No. A bug is a bug.
Even everyone saying Linus went full AI… Like… What? IMO he’s being practical. It IS a tool, and there ARE a lot of things it should not be used for, but using it to patch things before human verification happens is a pretty sensible thing to do.
Using AI to fix a bug is different than fixing a bug found by AI. Even in Torvald’s vibecoded patch, he introduced a new bug, then asked the reviewer to take over the patch and went on vacation.
Would love to hear from someone who has been programming for a long time and isn’t all just “AI bad because AI bad”.
While I get where this is coming from, being dismissive of people who you disagree with doesn’t exactly inspire healthy discussion. If you want genuine opposing opinions, those will only come from those you disagree with.
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The main problem I have with the bulk of Anti-AI opinions is that they are simply that: opinions, backed up with parroted “facts” many of which are baseless, untrue, blown out of realistic proportion, etc.
This is, to an unbelievabe extent, true of the “Pro-AI” crowd (in particular those selling AI). It’s to the extent that the economy is inevitably fucked once investors start pulling out. AI CEOs lie regularly about the capabilities of their products.
In any case, “pro-AI”/“anti-AI” is a political approach to AI, and politics revolves entirely around opinion. If you truly want “facts” then you have to be willing to accept facts that you disagree with as well.
It is a fact that many bugs have been found with AI, yes. It has provided value to a lot of people.
It is also a fact that for all the good AI has done for people, it is also an unregulated bullshit emitter. Shit, just the other day, I tried asking Kagi Assistant a question, and it gave me an answer in Chinese. My question was in English. It had nothing to do with languages. But if you want numbers, these AI companies publish their benchmarks publicly, so go look at those and consider whether “correct 80% of the time in a benchmark the model was optimized for” is good enough to always trust.
Finally, it is a fact that AI companies have done irreparable harm to the world on an enormous scale, socially, ecologically, politically, and so on.
unregulated bullshit emitter
Don’t worry, that’s why OpenAI and Anthropic are pretending that agents are attacking governments of their own volition. So the industry gets regulated and only “safe American AI companies” like themselves who do whatever the Trump admin says are allowed to be used on American soil. Then they’ll lobby the EU to ban Chinese models too. Especially open weight ones you could run on your own device, those are the devil.
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it’s important to remember the zero-sum aspects of the game. The money isn’t destroyed, it just changes hands - usually to people who are less free with risky investment of it.
Just nitpicking to point out that this is very much not true when it comes to stock markets and the like. If a company is worth $100B and drops to $50B in the course of a week, no one else became $50B richer from that stock, not even collectively. Publicly traded companies usually don’t even have 100% of their stock at the exchange. It could very well be that only 5% of stock was traded throughout that week, meaning somewhere between $2.5B and $5B changed hands (assuming each share was only traded once). Yet $50B is gone from the market because there’s no one left willing to pay more than the valuation. That’s why the market is called volatile: it’s not based on concrete value but purely a measurement of what people are willing to pay for it based on sentiment that might change at any moment.
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Oh, I agree, but you were the one talking about people losing their volatile investments and how you felt sad that your company’s stock had gone down. You weren’t talking about the act of exchanging shares, so I feel you’re moving the goalposts here…
Pretty much this is why I said that. I don’t agree with AI, but I also don’t agree with many of the people who spout No AI because they heard AI is bad… Like… Please think.
Parroting isn’t helpful. I’ve seen all the parroted shit everywhere. I understand the parroted stuff already. I’m looking for something more new and nuanced, so I’m filtering for that.
As far as Torvalds’ patch and vacation thing goes, I haven’t heard anything. But I doubt that’s the case for the hundreds of fixes that have happened.
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Hard agree
I agree with you, as long LLM users understand what they are doing.
That is why I do not vibe-code or vibe-admin. I only use it for research and ask follow-up questions if I don’t understand what it just told me would work. I recently primed my LLM assistant to tell me where I can find more info so that I can verify. The goal for me is, learning things along the way and not produce unmaintainable code or configs.
I agree with you, as long LLM users understand what they are doing.
Just adding that this is the lesser-talked-about issue with AI adoption. While “it’s a good tool” is a common argument, it really only holds true if the person using the tool is a skilled developer. For the moment, that’s fine.
What happens in 10-20 years when there are no developers, because the younger folks only learned how to interact with the AI and not how to code from scratch? It seems to me that it ceases to become a good tool in the longer term. The issue is epistemological.
This kind of forward thinking is rarely applied for such cases, though. Capitalist ventures always focus exclusively on the short term, regardless of the lofty goals attached to them (which generally are only there to attract investment anyway, not to serve as any kind of deeper analysis of the potential effects of a product).
There are issues with AI involving licensing and peoples IP and crediting sources and all that.
It has also massively reduced the barrier of entry for both finding and patching bugs, and producing realistic looking bug reports.
My biggest issue (other than enviromental and social impacts) is the load it puts on developers. They pretty much HAVE to use LLMs to triage and test bug reports… because it takes very little skill to use an LLM to “deep dive this area of the linux kernel and find a bug or RCE/CVE”, and the LLM probably will. But the unskilled user might not understand what the exploit/bug actually is. But they get some sort of POC and some sort of write up, and then they dump it on someone elses plate.
If that bug is actually patched/impossible because of something outside of the scope/context that the LLM used, or if its only a bug because of bad config… yeh, its a bug, but it isnt an important one. And it eats up developer resources to confirm/triage/fix that bug.Also, LLMs are an averaging engine. They work on “most likely” probability evaluations. So, you get average code.
There has to be a human in the loop
For a non-important piece of software, I agree that fixing small bugs is a waste of resources. This is this kernel.
I 100% agree there has to be a human in the loop. That’s non-negotiable to me in ANY use of AI. I’ve personally been stuck reviewing AI code that sucks and have had to send back with a list of reasons… That fucking sucks too. I still appreciate things like finding bugs or users using AI and understanding what they’re doing. It technically isn’t AI that’s the problem in a lot of cases… Its the misuse of a tool without understanding - which you get at. I don’t like that sort of thing, but well… Its better than nothing happening IMO. As I mentioned in my original comment, the main problem is when its too much for maintainers. Then yeah. Outright ban it no matter the use-case. Software NEEDS to be engineered well or everyone is in for a rough time down the line.
1 bug fixed, introducing 3 new bugs.
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Like a human writing C, I see
