I don't think there are any forks at the moment. I've been looking into alternatives and Ironclad seems pretty interesting. Aside from banning slop code, they also have an OS you can download as an .iso.

The issue is that there's barely any information in the entire damn Internet about this thing. I managed to run the OS on qemu without any issues, but I got stuck afterwards on a text-only interface since I have no damn clue of how commands work here.

I've been thinking along the same lines, actually. I'd personally love to switch to a no-AI kernel fork.

It seems someone has at least done the work to find the last commit not tainted by slop. So that's one tiny tiny baby step in the direction of such a fork, I guess.

Honestly, I'd happily sacrifice the newest/latest features of Linux. I could just stick with version 6.16.7 (which according to the above link is slop-free), except that some fairly impactful vulnerabilities have been discovered in Linux lately.

I use Gentoo and configure/build my own kernel manually, so I could also theoretically do some research and see how many of the vulnerabilities that are actively a problem in 6.16.7 are in parts of the kernel that I explicitly disable anyway.

I'm no C developer, though, let alone Linux kernel hacker. If I had the chops, I might honestly be considering making a fork myself right now.

I think you're probably going to need to go back a few years if you really want an untainted kernel. Pretty sure there have been LLM assisted commits for at least two years. And some of those likely didn't have any indication. To be safe, you probably want to go back to at least 2023 if not 2022.

I'm in the way of getting it off the ground, though I still don't know where to branch off from the main branch. First known AI slop contribution?

What should be the name? While "zilix" would be an obvious one, I want to avoid the ego issue Linus Torvalds have developed. Name it "Rockhopper" maybe? Or some other species of penguin? Leave the penguin branding in the past with Linus?

But I know that I'll try to reach out to contributors of Linux who are dissatisfied with the current direction of the kernel. And that I will try to lobby some memory safe API into the kernel (SafePosix?), meaning null terminated strings will be the no longer preferred alternative, for backwards compatibility only, though some functions may still return a null terminated string for simplicity sake, but now alongside with a length indicator.

Sadly the issue is there is no community around any other particular fork. Technically, there are many forks, mostly for hardware / distro reasons. If you wanted to be sure there are no “AI / LLM” contributions in the kernel, 5.15 has an epoch around February. The other series but I’m not sure. I’d personally like to see a reset probably further back.

I looked into this a few months ago to see how I’d go about addressing it but the hope was that they would at least leave the ”Assisted By” tag to track these types of commits… but sadly I was wrong. Sadly, the Linux kernel and the community around it are no longer trustworthy.

Sources say NetBSD is the way if your hardware supports it

If you're concerned about it being a security vulnerablility use the Linux LTS kernel (I think version 6.9.5 or something along those lines)

Hate to break it to you. But I actually would find it hard to trust a kernel or distro that doesn't use AI today. No one has the staffing levels or funding to keep up with the rate of AI identified vulnerabilities.

You might find this useful: https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#operating-systems

TL;DR - There aren’t a ton of options, especially that are daily drivable on the desktop for most people.