Re: [MAINTAINERS / KERNEL SUMMIT] AI patch review tools

[Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>]

On Wed, Oct 08, 2025 at 09:08:33PM +0200, Andrew Lunn wrote:
> > My goal for KS/MS is to discuss how to enable maintainers to use review
> > automation tools to lower their workload.
> 
> Maintainers will want to use these tools, if they prove to be
> useful. But ideally, we want the developers to use these tools and fix
> the issues before they post code for review. That reduces the
> maintainers workload even more. So Maintainers just need to run the
> tools to prove that the developers have run the tools and have already
> fixed the problems.
> 
> So i'm not sure your goal is the correct long term goal. It should be
> a tool for everybody, not just maintainers.

This raises the interesting and important question of how to get patch
submitters to follow a recommended workflow. We routinely get patches
that produce checkpatch errors that are clearly not false positives.
Rob Herring implemented a bot to run checks on device tree bindings and
device tree sources because lots of patches fail those checks. I'm sure
there are lots of other examples that have led maintainers to automate
checks on the receiver's side, through various types of standard CIs or
hand-made solutions. Submitters should run more tests, how to get them
to do so is a broader question.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart