Kroah-Hartman Tells Kernel Recipes 'Don't Panic' as Linux CVEs Pass 1,500 a Release

Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Linux kernel maintainer, gave a talk at Kernel Recipes 2026 in Paris titled "Security in the LLM age", and its message is "Don't Panic". The video reached 328 points on Hacker News. The numbers behind it are in his slides: kernel CVEs per release have roughly tripled.

The talk was held Sept. 21 to 23, according to Phoronix, which reported the slide figures on Aug. 28. Montana Linux, which linked the recording on Oct. 2, summarised it as an account of how life has changed over the past year because of LLMs and a sharp rise in CVEs.

The Terminal has not watched the video. What follows rests on the slides as reported by Phoronix, Kroah-Hartman's earlier public remarks and a security-vendor analysis.

CVEs per kernel release, from the slides

Phoronix reports that Linux 6.9 through 6.19 each carried about 500 CVEs. Linux 7.0 passed 1,000, and Linux 7.2 passed 1,500. The same report says Linux 7.3 may reach about 2,000.

1. Linux 6.9 to 6.19 (about)500 CVEs
2. Linux 7.0 (over)1000 CVEs
3. Linux 7.2 (over)1500 CVEs

Source: Phoronix, Aug. 28, 2026, citing Kroah-Hartman's Kernel Recipes 2026 slides

Kroah-Hartman also said that the source tree is about 40 million lines, which gives LLM-driven scanners a large area to search. Karthick Palanisamy, a developer writing in Security Boulevard, put the codebase nearer 34 million lines of C and argued it had not grown to match: "What changed isn't the kernel. It's who's reading it." The two line counts differ, and the sources do not say why.

The "slop" turned into real reports

The turn came earlier in the year. In a March interview reported by The Register, Kroah-Hartman said: "Months ago, we were getting what we called 'AI slop,' AI-generated security reports that were obviously wrong or low quality." Then: "Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports."

He said he did not know the cause, which could be better tools, new methods or coordinated effort across organisations. In a test with what he called a "really stupid prompt", about one third of 60 AI-suggested fixes were wrong and two thirds worked but needed human work on changelogs and integration. The kernel team runs Sashiko, now a Linux Foundation project, on nearly all patches to reduce reviewer load.

Counting is not the same as severity

More CVEs do not mean more exploitable kernels. Dvir Sasson, VP of AI and Security Research at Zest Security, wrote in the same Security Boulevard piece: "More than half the queue screams Critical; fewer than one finding in four hundred has evidence behind the scream."

Sasson's remark is about vulnerability queues in general, and none of the sources breaks the kernel's 1,500 into severity bands. A reader comparing 500 to 1,500 is looking at a workload for maintainers and distribution patch teams, and the sources offer no measure of risk to a server owner.

What to watch

The next number is the Linux 7.3 count. If it lands near 2,000 as the slides project, the stable team will have handled four times the 6.x volume. The AI-agent side of this problem has already shown up elsewhere, including in the exploited Zammad flaws CISA listed and the GitLab AI Gateway sandbox escape.