Linus Torvalds slams supporters of delisted Russian driver maintainers as ‘trolls’

Linus Torvalds has dismissed those concerned about the recent dismissal of Russian kernel driver maintainers as trolls. The notoriously candid software engineer was reacting to complaints about the dismissal of a dozen maintainers who, it emerged, all had some kind of Russian connection. Phoronix notes that Torvalds, the creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel, added his potentially incendiary comments to a Linux mailing list thread.

On Monday, Linux devotees started to become aware that a patch merged into the Linux 6.12-rc4 kernel had removed the maintainers of the Acer Aspire 1 EC driver, Cirrus Logic CLPS711X Arm architecture, Baikal-T1 PVT hardware monitor driver, Libata PATA drivers, Libata SATA AHCI Synopsys DWC controller drivers… and several more patches.

While mention of the maintainers had vanished, the drivers remained for now. It didn’t take long to discover a commonality among the removed maintainers—some association with Russia. Most of them had a .ru email address.

It was presumed that there must be a war in Ukraine linked to the dozen maintainers being dropped, and indeed, Linus Torvalds confirmed this in no uncertain terms on Wednesday.

Before discussing the reasons behind the maintainer delistings, Torvalds seemed keen to blast “lots of Russian trolls out,” whom he claimed to be obvious random bots who were attempting to fake a grassroots campaign to reverse the maintainer cull.

Torvalds continued, with his rage dial turned to 11, explaining the meaning of sanctions to those that weren’t clear. “If you haven’t heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read the news someday. And by “news,” I don’t mean Russian state-sponsored spam.”

Towards the end of his tirade, the Linux godfather reminded mailing list readers that he is a proud Fin before rhetorically asking, “Did you think I’d be *supporting* Russian aggression?” Then he told readers his critics didn’t need to brush up on their history and real news. It seems fair to assume that Torvald’s decision regarding Russian contributors will not be reversed soon.

Earlier this week, we reported that Torvalds was “fed up with buggy hardware and completely theoretical attacks.” We understand that particular outburst was prompted by some proposed code for linear address masking (LAM) for Intel Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs.