Lorenzo Stoakes, an Arm engineer who works on the Linux kernel’s memory-management code, posted a patch series on November 10, 2026 that removes him as a reviewer from several memory-management (MM) sections of the kernel’s MAINTAINERS file. In a later reply on the mailing list, he estimated that AI-generated submissions now make up about half or more of what he sees. The four-patch series drops his reviewer entries for MM core, MM misc, reclaim and the Rust-related MM sections. A fourth patch adds a CREDITS entry for his earlier work as a Transparent Huge Page (THP) co-maintainer. He keeps his maintainer roles.
The three MAINTAINERS commits all give the same reason. He says the number of AI-generated series now reaching the kernel leaves him time to review only the areas he maintains. The patches are signed off as Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM). Phoronix reports that he has contributed to the kernel since 2014 and that he wrote the book The Linux Memory Manager.
“I unfortunately lack the bandwidth to generally be able to offer review…”
Lorenzo Stoakes, Linux kernel memory-management maintainer, Arm
The estimate came in his reply to MM maintainer Andrew Morton in the same thread, which Tom’s Hardware reported. Stoakes said AI-generated patches first showed up only now and then. After that they came weekly, then every few days, and now they are roughly half of his inbox or more. According to the same coverage, he said the change is mainly meant to cut the noise in his inbox and that he may still step in to review other work.
The CREDITS patch follows a change from the summer. Stoakes removed himself as a THP co-maintainer on August 26, 2026, saying his workload no longer left him time for the area, and that patch was merged into mainline on September 2. In the new commit he says a return to THP is unlikely and names Zi Yan as his successor as co-maintainer. The MAINTAINERS: remove my reviewerships, add CREDITS entry for THP series was run through the linux-mm project’s automated test setup on November 10, where it passed its first round of checks.
Stoakes has argued about AI tooling on the list before. In January 2026, while the kernel’s proposed guidelines for tool-generated content were under review, he asked for the document to say more plainly that maintainers may reject such series outright. Those exchanges took place as patch volume kept rising across recent releases, which can be seen in kernel changeset and contributor counts by release.
Stoakes grouped the patches by the maintainers who handle each area: David Hildenbrand, Andrew Morton, and Alice Ryhl with Danilo Krummrich for the Rust code. He said this lets each of them take the relevant changes through their own trees. The commit messages do not name anyone to replace him in the sections he is leaving. Each maintainer still has to pick up their share of the series before it reaches a mainline release. The change affects developers who send MM patches, since tools that read the MAINTAINERS file, such as get_maintainer.pl, will stop listing Stoakes for those sections once the patches are merged. Background on the kernel’s overall size and contributor base appears in Linux Foundation and kernel development metrics.
