The ongoing rise in AI/LLM-generated patches hitting the mailing lists and affecting development workflows continues to impact Linux kernel development. For the ARM64 architecture updates in Linux 7.2 is an interesting anecdote over over feeling like this activity has "slowed us down a little on the feature side" and having to deal with this AI/LLM patch activity resulted in some features now being postponed from making it for this current Linux kernel development cycle.

Even before getting to the ARM64 Linux 7.2 kernel changes, longtime ARM Linux developer Will Deacon prefaced his feature pull request with:

"Please pull these arm64 updates for 7.2. The usual summary is in the tag, although it feels like the new world of AI tooling has slowed us down a little on the feature side when compared to the fixes side. The extra rounds of Sashiko review have also pushed a few things out until next time."

ARM64 is far from alone and is a sentiment shared by other upstream Linux kernel maintainers. From the burden of having to deal with more patches due to AI/LLM generation and not necessarily relevant or pressing patches to legitimate issues raised during code review by the likes of Sashiko continues to have an impact on Linux kernel development.

But what did get baked in time for ARM64 with Linux 7.2 includes new HWCAPS for the 2025 dpISA extensions, additional errata handling, prep work to be able to unmap the kernel data and BSS sections from the linear map, support for the MPAM v0.1 architecture, and various other changes.

See this pull request, since merged to Git, for all the interesting ARM64 feature details for Linux 7.2.