Linux 7.1: Kicinski Called It ‘LLM-pocalypse.’ Then Deleted 138,000 Lines.

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The Linux networking maintainer wrote about an ‘LLM-pocalypse’ in the same pull request that deleted 138,000 lines from the kernel.

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One hundred thirty-eight thousand lines. One pull request.

“If we want to have a fighting chance of surviving the LLM-pocalypse, this code needs to find a dedicated owner or get deleted.”

Jakub Kicinski, Linux networking maintainer, wrote that in his pull request message. Then he deleted it. All of it. Six entire subsystems. 138,000 lines of networking code that the world switched off years ago but the kernel kept compiling anyway.

On April 26, 2026, Linus Torvalds merged that pull request into Linux 7.1-rc1.

The first time in Linux history that AI-generated bug reports forced the removal of working software. Kicinski made it happen, and Linus approved for rc1 release; it ships to every server, phone, and embedded device running Linux within months. These protocols are permanently removed from the kernel.

What Kicinski Actually Deleted

Over 138,000 lines were erased in a merge window that also brought 12,996 changesets from 2,011 developers, 342 of them first-timers. The explicit motivation for the deletions: AI-generated security bug reports are flooding maintainers with work on code that has no real users left.

The networking subsystem removed ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), AX.25, amateur radio networking, ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), Bluetooth CMTP (the bridge protocol between Bluetooth and ISDN), CAIF (Communication CPU to Application CPU Interface), and dozens of old ISA, PCMCIA, and PCI networking drivers.

ATM was already a relic when I was debugging VLAN (Virtual LAN) tagging issues in 2008 at a telecommunications company during my internship. ISDN was the protocol our office PBX (Private Branch Exchange) used before I ripped it out and replaced it with SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) trunks. These protocols didn’t matter anymore, but a decade ago. The code stayed because every maintainer feared breaking a setup they could not see.

CC @belazor@lemmy.zip