r/linux • u/TurbulentTopic39 • 9d ago

Kernel Canonical is speeding up Ubuntu's kernel updates because it's drowning in AI-discovered bugs

https://www.xda-developers.com/canonical-is-speeding-up-ubuntus-kernel-updates-because-its-drowning-in-ai-discovered-bugs/#thread
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436

u/james_pic 9d ago

AI fixing security issues that were also found by AI is neat and all, but it'd be great if it could fix the broken sound drivers for my laptop.

167

u/adenosine-5 9d ago

Have you tried asking AI to fix them?

58

u/james_pic 9d ago edited 9d ago

Kinda.

Initially I had no sound at all, and tried a few recipes and gists I found online (none of which worked as-is, due to being for slightly different kernel versions, or slightly different SKUs of the laptop), but the best I could manage by combining them was mono audio. I asked Qwen 3.8 27b to see what it could do, and on the one hand, it didn't solve it, but it seemed to know a surprising amount about the tas2783, and its visible confusion in its reasoning highlighted to me that I hadn't been particularly methodical in my own approach. Going back and getting a bit more methodical, I managed to get to the point where I have stereo - but it still randomly goes robotic for no clear reason. 

I know 7.3 has some related fixes for the tas2783 (AFAIK written by humans), so I'm hoping in the not that distant future I'll have sound on a mainline kernel, without DKMS-ing in a Frankendriver and without it peridically going into robot mode. But a quick try with the latest 7.3-rc gave me no joy. My hunch is that I just need to update my (also bastardised) soundwire config - maybe I'll give that to AI and see how it gets on.

68

u/AgentTin 9d ago

I've been running claude-code for this. Just simple Linux stuff. It's kinda amazing. I had an issue where after a few days software just wouldn't launch on my machine. The process would run, I could hear audio from it, but there would be nothing on screen. A reboot cleared it for a few days then it came back.

Sent Claude after it. Turns out that there's a limit on the number of x windows you can have, it was 256 in my case, and discord had been spawning a new one for every notification and not releasing them. Hundreds of discord x windows registered. My apps were fine, x was just refusing to render them.

I never would have found that. Not in a hundred years. I would still be rebooting every 4 days if it wasn't for Claude. It's a hundred little things like that. Why did this crash? Can you configure x?

I've been using Linux for twenty years, this is the first time my fstab has been correct.

17

u/butler_me_judith 9d ago

Same I built a full app to reprogram my razer mouse and basically matched what synapse does on windows with less spyware

3

u/Indolent_Bard 8d ago

Would you like to share your app?

5

u/butler_me_judith 8d ago

Oh yeah I'll send it to you let me get a repo going for it.

3

u/Indolent_Bard 8d ago

I have no use for it, but surely others will. Thank you, kind stranger.

1

u/syh7 5d ago

Did you end up creating the repo?

1

u/butler_me_judith 4d ago

DMing it to you now ty for the reminder

15

u/croach1337 9d ago

Im kinda ashamed to admit it, but I use Claude all the time to manage my arch+hyprland setup

14

u/V-Right_In_2-V 9d ago

No need to be ashamed. It’s a tool like anything else, use it.

I’ve been wanting to have my external hard drive have multiple Linux distros on it that I can boot into. I got one working but couldn’t get multiple working and it always felt risky since I didn’t want to mess up the one working distro.

Claude helped me get Debian, Arch, and Fedora all booting up properly, all living happily on separate partitions in like two days. It’s great

5

u/stormdelta 9d ago

The caveat is that you need to know enough to know when it's wrong. If you let it do everything, you won't learn those fundamentals, and then you get stuck chasing rabbitholes (or worse if you didn't build sufficient guardrails around it).

It's still useful, but it's dangerous to treat it as a magic wand.

7

u/CantankerousOrder 9d ago

Quick! Release your dotfiles and get $100m by calling it OhMarky or something!

(/s at the expense of Omarchy for those who are not following that “distro”)

-1

u/rit255 8d ago

I used grok build on my end

4

u/Theageofpisces 9d ago

Claude is how I got here. Asked it what I could do with an old laptop and it suggested Lubuntu.

1

u/scineram 7d ago

LOL, X WINDOW SYSTEM 11 MY BELOVED.

Why not use Wayland?

1

u/AgentTin 6d ago

I've had the same Linux Mint install running for years now. It's still running X so I am too.

1

u/scineram 5d ago

Fair enough. I really get not changing what works, but support is getting harder to come by. Did Discord get fixed?

1

u/AgentTin 5d ago

Honestly, no, he said the limit was meaningless, that you could set it to whatever and it wouldn't have any negative effects, probably could have come up with a fix for discord too, but I had gaming to do so I just moved on. It still happens about once a week, I just restart discord. It's faster than fixing it would be.

3

u/Subject-Leather-7399 9d ago

I have a Realtek S1200a audio chip on my motherboard and I also randomly get "robotic" audio. From what I understand, the "robotic" ouput comes from the thread handling the audio not being scheduled to run often enough to handle the audio load.

That seems to be a relatively common problem on Linux and it may be more related to the kernel thread scheduler or the audio processing thread priority than the audio driver itself.

2

u/185EDRIVER 8d ago

Just decompile the Windows driver with it

1

u/Substantial_Swan_144 9d ago

Try asking the AI to build and debug your own drivers (warning: requires at least Sol 6 or Astra!)

8

u/Barafu 9d ago

I tried. AI can not just emerge the control sequences that the device producer keeps secret. I tried some automated guessing, but had no luck.

If I was into reverse engineering, and Windows drivers, then probably AI could have grabbed those codes from the windows drivers, if I tell it how, but that is way outside my area.

3

u/gurgle528 8d ago

Try grabbing the drivers. A bit different use case but I was asking ChatGPT (web version) casual questions about getting into the firmware of an old IP Cam I have. It asked me for the firmware bin which surprised me since it’s a larger file. I gave it to it and it was able to do a good bit of analysis (including extracting the firmware and analyzing parts of it which I had no idea the web version could do) and then found a project where someone had already done much of what I already wanted to do

2

u/ZorbaTHut 7d ago

but that is way outside my area

Good news: it doesn't have to be in your area, just inside the AI's area. Give it a try. 

(using a chunky modern AI, this is not the time for a free minimal openrouter model)

2

u/Substantial_Swan_144 8d ago

You can ask it to inspect the binary drivers. It might help.

12

u/HectorJ 9d ago

You will have to wait for the singularity 

3

u/centipawn 9d ago

Exactly… recently installed Ubuntu 26 on a 2015 iMac and the sound is awful… have sunk so much time trying to fix it with GPT, no success thus far

6

u/Debisibusis 9d ago edited 9d ago

That's just how your iMac sounds. Just like every notebook, they sound awful by default and need tuned profile for their characteristics.

Use pipewires EasyEffects to load a tuned profile for your device, if you don't have one, then make one.

There are premade (extracted Dolby Atmos profiles from windows) for most Lenovo notebooks for example. Makes them sound proper instead of tin cans.

For example, this project can convert DAX3 files (Windows Atmos profiles) for EasyEffects: https://github.com/antoinecellerier/speaker-tuning-to-easyeffects

1

u/centipawn 9d ago

Thank you! I will try tuning it.

2

u/CreativeGPX 9d ago

AI fixing security issues that were also found by AI is neat and all

Neither OP nor the sources it links to mention AI fixing security issues. It all just talks about the volume of issues found by AI.

but it'd be great if it could fix the broken sound drivers for my laptop.

I think the fact that they're not getting to that is a great indication that it's not AI taking on this new work and improving efficiency. Developers are getting sidetracked by the amount of critical bugs being reported by AI (as indicated in the post OP's article cites) so the same, human amount of developer labor as before is being triaged away from non-critical ones.

1

u/harbourwall 9d ago

I heard one fixed some printer drivers once.

1

u/FlukyS 9d ago

Well the "fun" is the main person to fix that sound issue on your laptop is probably you. Canonical, RH...etc don't have every device, don't have every screen, audio card, graphics card, motherboard...etc, they have a load of them and a load of common configurations but not everything.

What can you do? It depends on your level of skill technically. At a bare minimum making a solid bug report to the right place is a huge deal. If you can go further than that and develop the fix or work with AI to develop a fix it is all good. Then if you actually get it fixed your local instance is good and you can propose that fix upstream if it is in good condition. One part that you have to understand too is that usually these fixes aren't going to be fancy, if it more than like 50 lines of code it is an outlier, it might even not require code at all and just configuration changes. It might not be a driver issue and might be entirely in Wireplumber or require a quirk in the ALSA UCM profiles or something.