Linus Torvalds Endures A Debug Session From Hell, 'Enormously Helped' By AI
- Reference: 0185087962
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/08/21/1742239/linus-torvalds-endures-a-debug-session-from-hell-enormously-helped-by-ai
- Source link:
> The patch by Linus Torvalds is for the Xe kernel driver and the change is no longer hand out the flat Compute Command Streamer (CCS) storage as usable vRAM. On a Battlemage G21 graphics card, he was hitting a scenario where there was a mismatch where the usable memory ended and hit a case where the GDM display manager would end up being endlessly restarted. [...]
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> Linus Torvalds views AI as a [3]useful tool and in this case reaffirmed he found it "enormously helped" his effort in tracking down this Intel graphics driver bug. The Intel Xe driver fix is merged to Linux 7.3 Git and is also marked to back-porting to the stable kernel branches.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Debug-AI
[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=818bebeb63dd6bf5f4e07e145f6cdbace520a34c
[3] https://linux.slashdot.org/story/26/07/17/1830258/linus-torvalds-to-critics-of-ai-coding-on-linux-fork-it-or-just-walk-away
That's just it, it's a tool. (Score:3)
It's not your secretary. It's not your friend. It's not your therapist. It's not a replacement for your staff. It's not an artist. It's not a musician. It's not the second coming of Christ as Sam Altman want's you to believe.
It's a fucking tool!
Re:That's just it, it's a tool. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sam Altman and the rest of the AI Bros are desperate to have everyone think these tools are incredible and will transform society. Dean Kamen thought that about 'It/Ginger' as well, as did a lot of the early viewers of it, and yet no transformation has happened other than now the Segway is a weird novelty and cheap Chinese 'hoverboards' have eaten what little market it actually had.
AI is going to be somewhere in the middle as there are uses for the tool, but nowhere near the adoption they need. I've noticed a lot of people are now using ChatGPT and Gemini and others instead of doing traditional search engine searches, so that is driving use for now but as time passes the AI rot will make those results less useful. And the real elephant in the room - cost. 99.9% of the people using it now for free will never pay for it if it becomes a paid service only, so many of the revenue projections are completely out to lunch.
This is why the Bros are desperate to push it into every crevice, so that some of it sticks and will have to be paid for. But they overestimate how willing everyone is to pay.
Re: (Score:1)
Well, when your fridge refuses to keep stuff cool or your stove or toaster won't let you use them because you haven't made your payment to the 'Bros' yet, you'll sing a different tune, and that's what they're counting on.
For now, you can use it somewhat for free (the first hit is free) to get you hooked, then they drop a metric long-ton of fees on you once it's integrated into every facet of everyday life (after that first hit, you have to pay).
Re: (Score:2)
"and that's what they're counting on."
And yet again they're disconnected from reality. The AI Bros aren't making the appliances, the appliance companies are. And they're already seeing backlash from smart devices, and the carmakers are seeing near open rebellion on a normal function requiring a subscription (BMW heated seats). They won't be adding subscription based AI to appliances for a looooong time if ever, especially with some brands pushing non-smart appliances as a feature.
Unlike the AI Bros who n
Re: (Score:2)
> Dean Kamen thought that about 'It/Ginger' as well, as did a lot of the early viewers of it, and yet no transformation has happened other than now the Segway is a weird novelty and cheap Chinese 'hoverboards' have eaten what little market it actually had.
Yeah, I still totally don't grok why so many of the tech elite, who knew about Ginger long before it was publicly announced, were absolutely convinced it was going to revolutionize cities and/or society. Perhaps that should've been an early warning on just how disconnected that group is from the reality we common people face.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess nobody thinks they will not transform society. It's only that some visions are more ambitious than others and some more optimistic than others. Ask the doomers and we'll live in a hellscape soon because of AI.
Re: (Score:2)
" Ask the doomers and we'll live in a hellscape soon because of AI."
And by the doomers you mean realists right? One shit sandwich that AI has brought to existence is the whole Flock thing. Flock cameras + AI pattern recognition = surveillance state that just showed up without anyone really noticing until it was too late:
https://oecd.ai/en/incidents/2026-08-19-472a
https://gizmodo.com/flocks-new-ai-tool-does-much-more-than-track-license-plates-2000800372
Cops are already using this to track people for hours
Re: (Score:2)
You're derailing when you compare shit like Flock with useful tools like LLM and image generators.
Re: (Score:2)
It's getting to the point where it *can* be your secretary, if your needs are not particularly complex. I am using Gemma 4 for what amounts to journaling with feedback, and I have noticed that it has a decent idea when to apply Reasoning and when to just start spilling the tea—but it gets noticeably lazier about it as the context window fills up. Early in a session, it Reasons about every prompt. After 100K tokens of context, I explicitly have to ask it to use Reasoning or it generally won't (and some
In case you were wondering: (Score:2)
> Intel Xe (abbreviation for "exascale for everyone"[2]), earlier known unofficially as Gen12, is a GPU architecture developed by Intel.
I'm wondering if this is for the one of the graphics cards he uses for AI.
This is a great use of AI! (Score:2)
I love AI for bug hunting, it's fantastic, providing you keep it narrow, and focused. One of my techniques is to have the AI explain the code block I'm looking at, in detail, with examples, and then as we hunt, keep explaining how X, Y, A, B all link, using examples. What would take a week, or a month manually, can be done in a day, maybe two, and it's fantastic.
Re: (Score:2)
That's where a good agent really excels: Walking through a code base tracing data flow, calculating "should be" values, cross-linking interactions without getting annoyed about how convoluted the problem is. The only problem is when the model has too little context to keep its current work in "memory"
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, and that is a real issue, so you have to be careful, but, forgoing that, have multiple AI agents run the code. I've used OpenAI, Claude, Junie, at the same time, and it's interesting to see how they approach the issue.
Re: (Score:2)
I am pretty impressed by Qwen3.8 27B. In its reasoning it really is like "Let's compute this manually for comparision" and then writes like 3 pages of calculations to check where a wrong value might come from. And after older LLM had trouble with math (like in calculating) it has no problem to come to the correct result.
when AI fails (Score:2)
So your AI generates a lot of code, the code chokes, AI tells you to write a report, shit. Having to untangle a bunch of verbose AI code can be no fun. Doesn't quite feel ready for Prime Time, you still get these issues that are hard to undo.
Re: (Score:2)
Your Prime Time sitcoms and news casts are likely already written by AI.
gas light (Score:2)
Sometimes, the AI will gas light you. In those instances, you just need to stand your ground and fight back.
Claude gives up on me too (Score:2)
After a while I get a lot of excuses from Claude. So I clear the session. And start with new prompts. Generally I have to break the problem down into smaller pieces and connect the dots before the AI agent will agree that what I want to do is not only possible, it's the correct way to do it.
For what it's worth, I've had junior engineers get stuck and push back in a similar way. It's fine. If you don't know the answer, I can teach a human to methodically work through a problem to find answers. With an agent
I've noticed that too (Score:3)
> "I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it," wrote Torvalds on the commit.
I've been using Claude a bit lately, and I have noticed sometimes, if you're hashing through a task and having to iterate, it can get into a mode where it more or less tells you it's probably not worth spending more time on it. Also it does seem to love volunteering to write reports for some reason (without my having asked for one).
Re: (Score:2)
> volunteering to write reports for some reason
Which explains a lot of very overly verbose "reports" that have been sent to me about "issues". The person thinks they are using AI to make their report more useful, but I still find the human input to be sufficient and the AI reports to be a pain to actually work backwards to the issue. Especially when it decides to fixate on what it thinks is the root cause and gloss over what the actual problem was... Which has at least once become super counter-productive, as the report got it flat out wrong and the
Re: (Score:2)
One of the few times I actually wanted to submit a report on an issue, I basically threw away Claude's long prose and wrote the text myself... except I did lift a table of data from Claude's report and included it more or less verbatim.
Data tables are another thing Claude seems to like to generate.
Re: (Score:2)
One thing that I find funny is how lazy they are by default. Not just tasks like this where it's grinding for a long time, but coding in general. They love to stub in functionality or leave their future selves "todos" in the code. It's also hard to get them to write long prose. I have a powershell script that documents Azure environments and it uses AI calls to build the narrative parts of the document (the shit no one likes to write). I had to add minimum paragraph and sentence counts to the prompts it use
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I had to add minimum paragraph and sentence counts to the prompts it uses to keep it from trying to write a few terse sentences each time.
I noticed this in Claude (from DDG). It invariably tries to shorten sentences or make them more compact and concise. Sometimes that can be good, but most times long-winded sentences are what are needed.