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

[Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@linaro.org>]

On Wed, Oct 08, 2025 at 01:04:54PM -0400, Chris Mason wrote:
> There's definitely overlap between the bugs I'm finding and the bugs Dan
> Carpenter finds, so I'm hoping he and I can team up as well.

Sure!

In my experience the big thing when there are two tools that produce
similar output, the frustrating thing is duplicate bug reports.  For
example, Clang generates uninitialized variable warnings and so does
Smatch.  Smatch is a bit more ambitious so it catches more bugs but
also has more false positives.  I always search on lore for the
function name before reporting uninitialized warnings.

> 2) A code indexing tool with MCP server that Claude can use to find
> functions, types, and call chains more effectively.  This makes it more
> likely Claude can trace complex relationships in the code:
> 
> https://github.com/facebookexperimental/semcode
> 
> Asking claude to produce a callgraph for btrfs_search_slot() consumes
> ~444K tokens.  With semcode installed, the same query produces better
> results and uses 25K tokens. (btrfs_search_slot() has a huge callchain)
> 

Smatch has better call trees than any other tools.  The UI might not be
the best, but the data is there in the cross function database.  Where
Smatch falls down is when functions are called from assembly which isn't
often.

regards,
dan carpenter