On October 21, 2026, Linus Torvalds merged into Linux 7.4 the removal of __get_user() and __put_user(), historical variants that do not validate the user address range and are therefore unsafe. He drafted the conversion partly with Claude Code, used “as a fancy sort of Coccinelle script”: AI is settling into kernel maintenance, including for eliminating whole classes of memory bugs.

On 11 October 2026, Linus Torvalds published a kernel branch that reads from the page cache without taking folio references, written with the Claude Code coding assistant to relieve contention between many threads reading one file. If you run a heavily concurrent file server, watch this patch series: it targets the exact multi-threaded small-read bottleneck you feel, and it may land in Linux 7.4.