Why Linus Torvalds Insists on Active Voice for Kernel Commit Messages

Linus Torvalds’ guidance on commit‑message style for Linux 6.12‑rc2

In the announcement of Linux 6.12‑rc2 Linus devoted a large part of his mailing‑list post to the grammar of commit messages. He stresses that the issue is not code syntax but the English phrasing used in the git commit log.

Preferred style

Use active, imperative sentences (e.g., Fix null‑pointer dereference) rather than passive constructions ( The null‑pointer dereference was fixed).

Avoid phrases that hide the actor, such as “In this pull request the X driver’s error handling was fixed…”. Instead write “Fix X driver error handling…”.

When writing bullet‑point lists, start each item with a verb in the imperative mood.

Linus’ editing practice

When reviewing pull‑request messages he routinely cleans up whitespace, punctuation and indentation so that a single style is used throughout the tree. This work adds no functional change and does not increase the maintainer’s workload.

Rationale

Passive voice forces Linus to rewrite explanations, whereas concise imperative statements convey the change directly and make responsibility clear. The approach is common in many operating‑system projects and improves readability of the kernel history.

Observations on the 6.12‑rc2 release

The rc2 diffstat is larger than typical rc2 releases because of a global header rename ( asm/unaligned.h → linux/unaligned.h) and several roll‑backs.

File‑system changes account for roughly 25 % of the total diffstat, slightly higher than usual.

Additional spikes are caused by updates to folio documentation, not by code changes.

Historical contrast

Linus’ tone in this message is markedly softer than earlier incidents, such as the 2016 exchange with Red Hat engineer Mauro Carvalho Chehab, where he responded with a harsh rebuke.

References

https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/linus_torvalds_grammar_complaint/

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2410.0/07495.html