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

[Chris Mason <clm@meta.com>]

On 10/9/25 1:24 PM, Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 09, 2025 at 02:19:58PM -0300, Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 09, 2025 at 12:31:48PM -0400, Chris Mason wrote:
>>> On 10/9/25 10:30 AM, Steven Rostedt wrote:
>>>> 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.
>   
>>> Just to clarify, that's what already happens with BPF today.
>   
>>> Ex: https://github.com/kernel-patches/bpf/pull/9962  are all from the
>>> review prompts.
>  
>> This almost relieves me from the guilt not to have reviewed that series
>> from Alan ;-\
> 
> But this goes back to "developers should run these tools before
> submitting upstream",

I'd replace "should" with "can".  Developers are coming to us with
different levels of experience and resources, and we want to help them
expand the size of the problem they can tackle by giving them access to
these tools.  (szybot, 0day, perf, lockdep and all the different
analysis tools in the kernel apply here too).

But I also want to recognize that some people just aren't going to get
there.  We'll spend a lot more energy trying to force them than we would
letting them use the CI.

> which would provide them with reviewing comments
> that would improve the quality of their pull requests by using all the
> money that is being dreamed into AI and would saved all of us from
> looking at github, etc, before AI is satisfied with the quality of the
> submitters work?
> 

I think it's also important to remember that AI is sometimes wildly
wrong.  Having the reviews show up on a list where more established
developers can call bullshit definitely helps protect against wasting
people's time.

-chris