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

[Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>]

On Thu, 9 Oct 2025 12:14:05 +0300
Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com> wrote:

> Forcing contributors to pay for access to proprietary tools is not
> acceptable. Forcing contributors to even run proprietary tools is not
> acceptable. If maintainers want contributions to go through any
> proprietary tooling before submission, then this has to run on the
> maintainer side (be it on a maintainer's machine, in some form of CI, or
> somewhere else).

One way I see this working is to attach it to patchwork. Sending a patch to
the BPF mailing list has their patchwork trigger a bunch of tests and it
will tell you if it passed or failed. I'm assuming if it failed, it doesn't
add it to patchwork and the maintainers will ignore it.

Attaching AI to patchwork could be useful as well. But this would run on
some server that someone will have to pay for. But it will not be the
submitter.

I've been thinking of adding tests to run when people submit to the tracing
mailing list, but I don't want to waste my electricity on it ;-) I have
solar now, so perhaps I should.

> 
> You're right that cost would then be a problem. I can certainly imagine
> $popular_ai_company sponsoring this short term, until we're
> vendor-locked and they stop sponsorship. I don't think rushing in that
> direction is a good idea.

I don't see lock in being too much of an issue, unless the server that is
going to run this adds a lot of scripts that are built on one kind of API
that is vendor lock in. If anything, you just lose the service if it
becomes too expensive and you can't find an alternative.

-- Steve