Linus Torvalds Discusses AI, Rust, and the Future of Linux at KubeCon China

KubeCon China - at 33-and-a-third, Linux is a long player. So, why does Linus Torvalds hate AI?

Friday morning, Hong Kong time, a packed hall of maintainers and developers did something unusual in Chinese culture - they whooped and roared their approval at the sight of an urbane Finnish American onstage. Thus, Hong Kong welcomed the father of Linux, Linus Torvwalds, to the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon stage - though he acknowledged he was here for the third-billed conference in this package event: the Open Source Summit. "I didn't know that," he joked when welcomed to KubeCon specifically - his first visit to Hong Kong, though not his first to China. Now in his mid-50s, Torvalds has spent well over half of his life on open-source operating system Linux, which is one-third of a century old this year - plus a fair chunk of it on version control system Git, which he also launched. When asked how many of the audience were younger than Linux, roughly one-third put their hands up: so, to them, Torvalds must be a legendary figure: a prime mover of the industry they love. (So much so that China is now the world's number two open-source contributor, as my previous report explained. He said: This Sunday, it will be 33 years since I sent the first email [about Linux]. It wasn't the release itself, which was a little later, but it was the first email where I said, 'Hey, I've been working on this thing since April, and it's almost ready now.' And here we are literally a third of a century later - 33 years plus four months - and it's still almost ready! We'll see if we ever get there. Indeed, the Linux kernel is currently at release 6.11 RC4. Torvalds said: What's interesting to me is we've been doing this same [iterative 9-10 week] release process now for almost 20 years. And you'd think that all the basics would have been fixed long ago! But that's not actually true: a lot of the discussions we have going on right now, both privately and on the main list, are still about core kernel operations. For example, we have long discussions about memory management, which is not like some new hardware thing. I mean, new hardware is where a lot of the lines of development go, and that's why drivers tend to be half of every new kernel release. But I find it interesting that we're still discussing really core issues that I would have thought would have been solved ages ago. New behavior patterns end up meaning that we still need to tweak these core things. But I like that. I am not complaining at all. This is why I do operating systems. In a world of Big Tech pizazz and endless talk of 'innovation' - which is generally designed to give share prices a boost - Torvald's candor and pragmatism are refreshing: a culture in which 'move collaboratively and fix things' trumps moving fast and breaking them. Has 'the vision thing' ever been important to him? He said: I don't really have this policy; it's the details that really matter. We have big-picture ideas of where we want to go in the long range, but most of the real development is about getting all the details right. You don't look five years ahead for that. You look one or two releases ahead at most. Later this year, we will have the 20th anniversary of the Real-Time Linux project [...] and the people involved are finally at the point where they feel like it is done! They are still tweaking the last things, so that they will be completely merged into the upstream part. So, when people think that we do kernel development very quickly and releases every two months, it's true, but that's partly because there's all this parallel development going on. Some features happen quickly, in a couple of months, but a lot of features have years, and in some cases decades, of work behind them before they get fully merged. The current policy of rolling updates and releases arose out of a process that was originally much more chaotic, he explained: Good code is good code, but I keep very strict rules on release management. So, if your code is not ready by the time the merge window opens, I will not take it, because I don't want the kind of pain that we had 20-plus years ago. So, today we have a very reliable release process, even if the individual features may not always be released when we would like them to be. He added: Bugs will happen, and any bug can be a security bug, if somebody is clever enough to figure out how to misuse it. So, being a kernel, security is obviously one of the most critical things we must keep in mind. But at the same time, we need to move forward. We need to support new hardware. We need to support all these new ways of doing development or using hardware, and that means that we can't make security the only priority. So, what of the growing importance of programming language Rust in the Linux kernel - something about which there has been intense debate online? Torvalds said: The very slowly increased footprint of Rust has been a bit frustrating. I was expecting uptake to be faster, but part of it - a large part of it, admittedly - has been a lot of old-time kernel developers are so used to C and really don't know Rust, so they're not excited about having to learn a whole new language that is, in some respects, fairly different. So, there's been some pushback for that reason. Another reason has been the Rust infrastructure itself has not been super stable. So, in the last release I made, we finally got to the point where the Rust compiler that we can use for the kernel is the standard upstream Rust compiler, so we don't need to have extra version checks and things like that. I'm hoping that we're over some of the initial problems, but it has taken us one or two years and we're not there yet. However, with KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, AI_dev, and the Open Source Summit being presented as a single, integrated event in Hong Kong - with different content streams and linking keynotes - Torvalds was clear that his own focus is very specific: he is just not interested in most of it, he said. Indeed, he travelled thousands of miles to make his point: One of the things that makes me enjoy open source so much is obviously just the community. Being involved and having lots of different people to communicate with, that's what really keeps me going. But the thing that makes it all practical is that people specialize in what they're interested in. So, when I say no, it's because it's just not my interest area. So, when it comes to things like Cloud, Kubernetes, or AI, to pick the hot topic of the day, I see myself as a kernel person who wants to support that, but I don't see myself as a person who is at all interested in the end result! So, when AI people came in, that was wonderful, because it meant somebody at NVIDIA had got much more involved on the kernel side, and NVIDIA went from being on my list of companies who are not good to my list of people who are doing really good work. But that doesn't mean that I, personally, end up being interested in AI. I am just interested in what we need to do in the kernel to support AI. I still see myself as a core kernel person. But I think it's a good thing that people specialize. So, if people ask me about Linux using the cloud, I'm like, 'I know Linux. But I don't know cloud.' But might AI have a role to play in the development of Linux itself? Torvalds said: I have been talking to people who are looking at this, at making AI understand kernel code, and I am hopeful. I mean, I still don't like AI. Not in the sense that it's this horrible hype thing that everybody talks about. But it keeps on coming, and at some point, you just want to tune it out! But at the same time, I'm hoping that in five years or maybe sooner, we will be in the situation where we take AI more for granted, and we actually have these everyday tools that aren't just writing. I realize that you can use AI today to write JavaScript or Python and things like that, but we're not at the point where AI is yet helping us find bad patterns in the kernel source code. But there are people working on that, and I'm actually optimistic about it. I'm not so much interested in AI writing code. I'm much more interested in it finding bugs proactively and doing code review, helping maintainers and developers run better code. And I think we will get there, but we're not there yet. Could he be more specific about the role that AI might play in the kernel? Torvalds said: What I've been hoping for - and I've been talking to a couple of people from big companies that I won't name - is not the traditional LLM that just predicts what you're doing, but something that hopefully takes the kernel source code history and other projects into account and learns what good code patterns are, and red flags things that it says look suspicious. However, right now, most of the tools are at the 'fairly obvious' stage, and I think AI can do better. But it's probably not commercially the number one priority for AI companies. So, we'll just have to see what happens. Then he added: [With AI it's] what's the big vision? And things like that. But I've never had a big vision. And I don't want to have them! I associate visions with drugs and mental issues. I see myself as a plugging engineer, and I'm proud of that. I don't like that much vision for the future of open source! In this day and age where hysterical levels of hype cloud business decisions based on precious little evidence, we should treasure figures who are all about doing a single job brilliantly, collaboratively, and predictably.

Linus Torvalds talks AI, Rust adoption, and why the Linux kernel is 'the only thing that matters'

Hong Kong: At The Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit China conference, Linus Torvalds and his buddy Dirk Hohndel, Verizon's Head of the Open Source Program Office, once more chatted about Linux development and related issues to the delight of their audience. As usual, the pair talked about the current state and future of the Linux kernel. In particular, their conversation touched on various aspects of Linux development, including the release process, security, Rust's Linux integration, and the role of AI in software development. Also: The Linux security team issues 60 CVEs a week, but don't stress. Do this instead First, Torvalds is sorry to report that sched_ext, an extensible scheduler for building scheduling policies with eBPF, will not be included in the next Linux kernel release. He hopes, though, literally knocking on wood, that it will be in the forthcoming Linux 6.12 release. Thinking about future releases, Hohndel asked Torvalds about his plans for the Linux kernel. Specifically, since at the current kernel release rate, "the Linux kernel 8.7 should come out about your 60th birthday, what do you see in it?" Torvalds replied, "I really don't know." Torvalds continued that he he focuses on the shorter term. "The real development is about getting all the details right. And you don't look five years ahead for that. You look one or two releases ahead." Also: How open source is steering AI down the high road Of course, Torvalds added, "Some features take longer than that. Later this year, we will have the 20th anniversary of the real-time Linux project. This is a project that literally started 20 years ago, and the people involved are finally at that point where they feel like it is done... well, almost done. They're still tweaking the last things, but they hope it will soon be ready to be completely merged in the upstream kernel this year." At the same time, Torvalds mentioned that even though Linux is 33 years old now, "You'd think that all the basics would have been fixed long ago, but they're not. We're still dealing with basic issues such as memory management." The work is never done. These days, the Linux kernel's development process has a highly structured and rhythmic beat. Despite its complexity, the process has become highly reliable over the years. Torvalds mentioned that while they aim for a release every nine weeks, it didn't used to be that way. In the beginning, the process was very chaotic. Torvalds reminisces that when he first said he no longer wanted to do one major release every year or two but smaller releases every six weeks, everyone laughed at him. As for the release numbers, Torvalds reminded everyone yet again, they mean nothing. Hohndel said, "You typically change the major number around 19 or 20, because you get bored." No, replied Torvalds, it's because, "when I can't count on my fingers and toes anymore it's time for another 'major' release." Also: Nvidia finally open sources some of its GPU drivers. How to tell what's under your hood The pair then shifted gears into security. Hondhel brought up the huge number of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) in the Linux kernel. This isn't because Linux is insecure. Torvalds replied, "Bugs will happen, and anything can be a security bug if somebody is clever enough to just figure out how to abuse it." Torvalds continued, "One reason why I stress that all security issues are just bugs is that there's this tendency in the IT industry to treat security issues as something really, really, really special, and that actually ends up harming everybody." So, what should you do about the constant weekly flow of Linux security bug fixes? Greg Kroah-Hartman, the maintainer of the Linux stable kernel, thinks you should constantly update to the newest, most secure stable Linux kernel. Torvalds agrees but can see the case for sticking with older kernels and relying on less frequent security patch backports. Also: 10 things I always do after installing Linux - and why you should too Torvalds said, "There is some stability with old kernels, and we do backport for patches and fixes to them, but some fixes get missed because people don't think they're important enough, and then it turns out they were important enough." Besides, if you stick with an old kernel for too long when you finally need to update to a newer one, it can be a massive pain to do so. So, "to all the Chinese embedded Linux vendors who are still using the Linux 4.9 kernel," Torvalds said, wagging his finger, "Stop." In addition, Hohndel said that when patching truly ancient kernels, the Linux kernel team can only say, "Sorry, we can't help you with that. It was so long ago that we don't even remember how to fix it." Switching to a more modern topic, the introduction of the Rust language into Linux, Torvalds is disappointed that its adoption isn't going faster. "I was expecting updates to be faster, but part of the problem is that old-time kernel developers are used to C and don't know Rust. They're not exactly excited about having to learn a new language that is, in some respects, very different. So there's been some pushback on Rust." Also: 5 first-rate Linux distros for power users (or anyone seeking a challenge) On top of that, Torvalds commented, "Another reason has been the Rust infrastructure itself has not been super stable." In general, Torvalds doesn't care about newer technologies like the cloud and Kubernetes. "The only thing that matters is the kernel." Hohndel rejoined, "That's sure to be taken out of context!" Torvalds replied that he knows they are all very useful, but "clusters, clouds, and Kubernetes are not an issue for me. The great thing about open source is that everyone specializes in what they're interested in." The pair then moved on to the hottest of modern tech topics: AI. While Torvalds is skeptical about the current AI hype, he is hopeful that AI tools could eventually aid in code review and bug detection. Also: Like it or not, this open source AI definition take a giant step forward In the meantime, though, Torvalds is happy about AI's side effects. For example, he said, "When AI came in, it was wonderful, because Nvidia got much more involved in the kernel. Nvidia went from being on my list of companies who are not good to my list of companies who are doing really good work." Hohndel concluded the discussion by saying he'd used ChatGPT to come up with the top ten questions he should ask Torvalds. The first was, "How do you see the future of open-source software involved, especially with the rise of cloud services and proprietary software?" Torvalds groaned and replied, "I never had a vision. I don't want one. I see myself as a plodding engineer." On that note, the interview ended to the crowd's applause.