Will call it a human slop. AI may've given them some code but they certainly haven't use it fully. I uploaded the defrag.c in ChatGPT asking to review on performance/correctness/safety and pointed the sames issues as you (alongside bunch of others but not interested at the moment to review them).
The code base is huge for an LLM to handle, perhaps it was generated over multiple prompts idk. Not sure if someone can train a model on the kernel code or exfatprogs and generate the code. I doubt someone with such expertise would even go through the process when they can just write the code themselves which is much easier.
>Not sure if someone can train a model on the kernel code or exfatprogs and generate the code.
They can certainly finetune such a model. Not a crazy idea, just computationally expensive. (But less expensive than training from scratch.)
*Of course Linux driver also uses many includes so if consider those alongside linked code the number goes significantly up.
Model training requires GPUs w/ 1kW TDP. I can shit out code on noodles and red bulls. Not sure about the quality, but still way less energy :)
Jokes aside, the defrag program probably was a slob to some extent.