# Torvalds’ Linux Test Shows About Three Times Baseline Read Throughput

By Simon Yoon

Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/39535
Published: 2026-10-24T02:05:57.000Z
Updated: 2026-10-24T02:05:57.000Z
Section: Technology

> Claude Code helped with an experimental memory-management change. The benchmark covered one laptop and a specific pattern of small reads.

Linux kernel developer Linus Torvalds used Anthropic’s Claude Code to help develop an experimental memory-management change that delivered about three times baseline read throughput in one laptop benchmark. The result applies to a narrow workload, and the proposal remains under discussion.

The eight-patch series targets contention when multiple threads read the same cached file data. Its proposed fast path lets some reads copy data without updating a shared reference count.

In the test, eight threads repeatedly made 16-byte reads from the same one-page file. Throughput rose to 30 million to 33 million reads per second, from 9.9 million to 10.4 million. Kernel cycles per read fell from 2,937–2,975 to 725–726.

The benchmark ran on Torvalds’ four-core, eight-thread laptop, using ext4 with mitigations and CONFIG_HARDENED_USERCOPY disabled. Torvalds said he had not measured the change on a larger machine, so the figures describe this setup and workload rather than a general Linux performance gain.

Claude Code helped with the code, test programs, review and first draft of the commit description. Torvalds ran the benchmark himself.

The initial series also had unresolved issues. Testing with the first six patches produced an out-of-memory failure in a reproducer, and the patch description flagged a possible alloc_contig_range() failure. Patches seven and eight shortened the queue of pages waiting to be freed, while other design questions and limited testing remained.

On Oct. 19, Meta engineer Kiryl Shutsemau posted an 18-patch request for comments that reworked the approach. It combined seven patches from Torvalds with 11 from Shutsemau. The RFC remains a proposal and does not show that the change has been adopted into the mainline Linux kernel.

In May, Torvalds separately raised concerns about duplicate AI-generated vulnerability reports overwhelming the kernel security list. He urged people submitting reports to read the documentation and contribute a patch or other useful work.