Meta engineer Kiryl Shutsemau on Monday, October 19, posted a reworked version of Linus Torvalds' AI-assisted patches that let Linux read from the page cache without taking folio references. The 18-patch request for comments, "mm: read the page cache without folio references," combines seven patches by Torvalds with 11 of Shutsemau's own and shows large gains for small, many-threaded reads of a single file, Phoronix reported .

"Small reads of one file from many CPUs all take and drop a reference on the same folio, and its refcount bounces between the CPUs," Shutsemau wrote in the cover letter. "It is Linus' RFC, reworked: a folio that such a reader may copy from is freed only after an RCU grace period."

From a Claude Code branch to the mailing list

The work started as an eight-patch branch named noref-filemap-read-with-llm that appeared in Torvalds' kernel tree, with its top commit dated October 10 and based on Linux 7.3-rc6.…