Linux Kernel Becoming a Slopfest - Part 6 - Seeing Who Contaminates Linux With Slop (And Also Admits It)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 21, 2026

Today we begin looking at some culprits (by all means revisit Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5). We'll try to focus on their employer (company) rather than their name. Private persons do all sorts of crazy things for a salary (or shares) and I keep getting told that many employers strictly mandate using slop for code.

Linux is being contaminated by LLM slop and Rust, which means lots of Linux developers don't know what's going on, cannot read the code, and cannot keep up with changes. This will make the project increasingly unmaintainable. This seems to be the goal of Linux-hostile companies. Similarly, they try to fracture GNU by making it incompatible with itself (or with lousy, sloppy clones of it).

We now (this week) deal with where the slop comes from.

Trying to find an easy way to grep the logs in git, we've eventually realised that the string 'assisted by' gives too many false positives, however keyword/string "Assisted-by: LLM" works (we we can probably ignore 1991 to 2024 in logs because we don't expect to find such a string there; anything before the slop frenzy is of no relevance to us).

Let's examine recent changes:

$ git log --grep '^Assisted-by: LLM'

We get this massive file, derived from the latest kernel.

This was two weeks ago:

Author: Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM) <ljs@kernel.org>
Date:   Tue Sep 8 21:55:02 2026 +0100


Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260909062917.89482-1-kmehltretter@gmail.com
    Fixes: dae8dda341d2 ("tracing: Fix subbuf resize races with trace_pipe_raw readers")
    Assisted-by: LLM

Some of them use E-mail accounts that do not reveal who they work for. Who are the worst culprits?

   32     Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner (Amutable) <brauner@kernel.org>
     31     Signed-off-by: Jori Koolstra <jkoolstra@xs4all.nl>
     21     Signed-off-by: Linus Walleij <linusw@kernel.org>
     16     Signed-off-by: Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org>
      9     Signed-off-by: Paolo Abeni <pabeni@redhat.com>
      8     Signed-off-by: David Sterba <dsterba@suse.com>
      7     Signed-off-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org>
      6     Signed-off-by: Karl Mehltretter <kmehltretter@gmail.com>
      6     Signed-off-by: Ilpo Järvinen <ilpo.jarvinen@linux.intel.com>
      6     Signed-off-by: Dmitry Torokhov <dmitry.torokhov@gmail.com>
      6     Signed-off-by: Chuck Lever <cel@kernel.org>
      5     Signed-off-by: Miguel Ojeda <ojeda@kernel.org>
      4     Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
      3     Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
      3     Signed-off-by: Johannes Thumshirn <johannes.thumshirn@wdc.com>
      3     Signed-off-by: Boris Burkov <boris@bur.io>
      2     Signed-off-by: Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann@suse.de>
      2     Signed-off-by: Qu Wenruo <wqu@suse.com>
      2     Signed-off-by: Nicolas Schier <nsc@kernel.org>
      2     Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
      2     Signed-off-by: Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM) <ljs@kernel.org>
      2     Signed-off-by: Ivan Immanuel Shaji <ivanimmanuel1234@gmail.com>
      2     Signed-off-by: Guopeng Zhang <zhangguopeng@kylinos.cn>
      2     Signed-off-by: Etienne Perot <eperot@google.com>
      2     Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov (AMD) <bp@alien8.de>
      2     Signed-off-by: Aleksei Sviridkin <f@lex.la>
      1     Signed-off-by: Yazen Ghannam <yazen.ghannam@amd.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>
      1     Signed-off-by: Vishnu Razdan <vrazdan@openai.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Tianchu Chen <flynnnchen@tencent.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@kernel.org>
      1     Signed-off-by: Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>
      1     Signed-off-by: Soheil Hassas Yeganeh <soheil.kdev@gmail.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Roman Prucha <zorgan.roman@gmail.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Qing Luo <luoqing@kylinos.cn>
      1     Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
      1     Signed-off-by: Paulo Alcantara <pc@manguebit.org>
      1     Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
      1     Signed-off-by: John Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Joerg Roedel <joerg.roedel@amd.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Jay Vadayath <jay@artiphishell.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
      1     Signed-off-by: Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>
      1     Signed-off-by: Dinh Nguyen <dinguyen@kernel.org>
      1     Signed-off-by: David Lee <david.lee@trailofbits.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Daasaradhi Mannava <daasaradhimannava@gmail.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Andrew Stellman <astellman@stellman-greene.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Andrea Parri <parri.andrea@gmail.com>

All the above openly admit to be using LLMs for code and to have also committed slop into Linux recently.

There may be many more, but they didn't do so lately or they simply keep it secret, they don't disclose using plagiarism engines.

To replicate this use wget or curl (or equivalent) to download http://techrights.org/files/assisted-by-llm-in-linux.txt

Then:

awk '/Signed-off-by:/' [downloaded file location] | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

We can rerun this every now and then for fresher data.

Remember that many people simply hide their (mis)use of plagiarism engines.

At later parts we'll take a closer took at the above list. This merits more discussion and an explanation of why it's disconcerting. █