Before getting to the Linux 7.3 networking changes this cycle, maintainer Jakub Kicinski noted that they have become "completely overwhelmed" due to the increase in AI usage. As noted in recent weeks/months they have been bombarded with patches , continued craziness , and in turn dropping old networking code/drivers to reduce the AI patch noise for drivers likely being unused by anyone running a modern, up-to-date Linux kernel. Yet the AI/LLM agents are relentless and the networking developers continue to be affected. Their response now though to all this AI activity is... Letting AI agents and frontier models do more of the work moving forward.
Jakub remarked in the Linux 7.3 networking pull request:
"Quick and dirty count suggests we (Paolo and I) merged a very similar number of net (632) and net-next (648) patches. This is not telling the full story either because 1/3 to 1/2 of the net-next patches also *seem* like AI-driven low priority fixes, cleanups and clarifications.
We are completely overwhelmed, of course. The glimmer of hope is that we secured sufficient LLM budget and access (thank you Meta!) to run reviews with multiple frontier models on each patch. This eliminates some hallucinations. That said, in terms of review, the LLMs can only do so much. The sad truth is that our APIs (especially for rare events like PCIe errors, timeouts etc.) have always been racy, and now LLMs don't let us ignore that. I expect our direction for the next release will be to tweak the reviews a little bit more, but start shifting focus to letting the LLMs take care of the busy work - managing patchwork, automating common process complaints, editing commit messages, and maybe applying patches which already got "reviewed-by" tags from people we trust..."
So hopefully they will be able to effectively leverage AI themselves to fend off this increase due to AI. Meta is providing for their AI token budget.
As for the networking changes this cycle, there is now support for BIG TCP in UDP tunnels with the VXLAN and Geneve drivers, improved multi-patch TCP (MPTCP) handling of extreme memory pressure, and other core improvements.
For wired networking drivers there is initial CXL support for AMD/Solarflare NICs, initial skeleton Intel iXD driver, support for firmware flashing on AMD Pensando NICs, and other driver changes.
The Intel iXD driver is going to be used for supporting the Intel Control Plane PIC Function on Intel E2100 and later IPUs and FNICs. For Linux 7.3 the very basic Intel iXD driver infrastructure is being put into place.
On the WiFi driver side are continued Multi-Link Operation (MLO) enhancements, the new mm81x driver for Morse Micro Long-Range S1G devices, and NXPWIFI as a new wireless driver for NXP devices. The Mediatek MT76 driver added support for the MT7928 and MT7925 NAN.
More details on the many networking updates for Linux 7.3 via this pull .