Linux creator Linus Torvalds has personally fixed a tricky bug in the upcoming Linux kernel 7.3, notable both because he rarely writes code himself these days and because he leaned heavily on an AI tool to hunt it down. The fault, in the kernel driver for Intel Xe graphics, caused machines to freeze during boot just as the system switched to graphics mode to display the login screen, making it especially hard to trace.

The underlying cause was a memory-allocation error in how the driver handled Intel's Compute Command Streamer storage: a calculation was rounding memory addresses up rather than down, occasionally marking already-used memory as free. The eventual fix was a single line of code, but reaching it took 24 patches and 18 kernel boots. Torvalds credited an AI assistant with doing much of the debugging grunt-work, including writing 42 chunks of test code, though he noted it repeatedly declared the problem unsolvable before he pushed it to keep going; he also let the AI draft the commit message.