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

[Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzk@kernel.org>]

On 08/10/2025 19:04, Chris Mason wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Depending on how you look at things, this is potentially a topic for
> either MS or KS.
> 
> One way to lower the load on maintainers is to make it easier for
> contributors to send higher quality patches, and to catch errors before
> they land in various git trees.
> 
> Along those lines, when the AI code submission thread started over the
> summer, I decided to see if it was possible to get reasonable code
> reviews out of AI.
> 
> There are certainly false positives, but Alexei and the BPF developers
> wired up my prompts into the BPF CI, and you can find the results in
> their github CI.  Everything in red is a bug the AI review found:
> 
> https://github.com/kernel-patches/bpf/actions/workflows/ai-code-review.yml
> 
> My goal for KS/MS is to discuss how to enable maintainers to use review
> automation tools to lower their workload.  I don't want to build new CI
> here, so the goal would be enabling integration with existing CI.
> 
> My question for everyone is what would it take to make all of this
> useful?  I'm working on funding for API access, so hopefully that part
> won't be a problem.
> 
> 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.
> 
> In terms of actual review details, the reviews have two parts:
> 
> 1) The review prompts.  These are stand alone and can just work on any
> kernel tree.  This is what BPF CI is currently using:
> 
> https://github.com/masoncl/review-prompts/
> 
> These prompts can also debug oopsen or syzbot reports (with varying
> success).


In general, I like this entire idea a lot, because I believe it could
drop many style or trivial review points, including obsolete/older code
patterns.

Qualcomm is trying to do something similar internally and they published
their code as well:
https://github.com/qualcomm/PatchWise/tree/main/patchwise/patch_review/ai_review
Different AI engines can be plugged, which solves some of the concerns
in this thread that some are expected to use employer's AI.

They run that instance of bot internally on all patches BEFORE posting
upstream, however that bot does not have yet AI-review enabled, maybe
because of too many false positives?

I also think this might be very useful tool for beginners to get
accustomed to kernel style of commit msgs and how the patch is supposed
to look like.

Best regards,
Krzysztof