Linus Torvalds Let Claude Code Fix the Linux Page Cache. Then Reviewers Found a Race
The New Stack, Wednesday, October 14th, 2026
Torvalds used Claude Code on a long-standing page-cache bottleneck; reviewers then found a race condition.
Linus Torvalds submitted a 10-patch series developed with Claude Code that delivered a 23-fold throughput gain in a synthetic benchmark by removing folio reference-count operations from a common buffered-read path.
He had run a broken version of his own fix for 18 months, and he cautioned that real-world gains would be much smaller.
Reviewers found a race condition and raised memory reclamation concerns, and Torvalds handed further work to kernel developer Kiryl Shutsemau.
The episode is a high-profile test of AI-assisted kernel development.