Finding mm patches to review before those are pulled into the mainline (was "Re: [PATCH v2] fix AMDGPU failure with periodic signal")

[SeongJae Park <sj@kernel.org>]

On Tue, 6 Jan 2026 21:52:25 +0000 Pedro Falcato <pfalcato@suse.de> wrote:

[...]
> I understand your point. I don't think anyone wants to see patches falling
> through the cracks. But we also don't want patches to get applied without
> any review.

I can also clearly see both Andrew and Lorenzo are trying their best to make
Linux kernel better with only good faiths.  I always appreciate their such
efforts.  And both their opinions make sense to me in their ways.

> 
> Perhaps it's time to deploy something like Patchwork to help track
> outstanding patches?

Nooo...  I'm too dumb and lazy to learn how to use Patchwork...

I believe we always have rooms to improve, though.  One way to resolve concerns
raised here would be asking Andrew, someone, or some tools pinging relevant
reviewers of patches that Andrew wants to add to mm tree.  But I think that
might be too much request for a signle human, especially for mm, which is a
huge subsystem that many reviewers exist.  And because the reviewers have their
own tastes, the solution may not fit very well to all the reviewers.  For
example, someone might dislike directly getting such notification mails in
their inbox.

In the past, I actually considered making and running a tool that scans patch
mails that not Cc-ing relevant reviewers based on get_maintainers.pl and
forward those to the missing reviewers.  But I didn't make it because I worried
polluting someone's inbox.  I should also confess I worried my electricity bill
:)

As an alternative way, I was wondering what if reviewers consider mm tree as a
kind of compacted and curated version of the mailing list.  That is, using the
mm tree as the useful place that we can more easily find patches that we need
to review asap.  If it turns out there is no time to review immediately, the
reviewer can always ask Andrew to wait.

Finding such patches from mm tree may be much easier than doing that from the
mailing list, since the number of patches to look for is much smaller, and
writing scripts for that would be much easier, since we can use our favorite
tool, git.  For example, I just wrote below simple script to find such patches
for DAMON from mm tree:


'''
#!/bin/bash

if [ $# -ne 1 ]
then
        echo "Usage: $0 <commits>"
        exit 1
fi

commits=$1

review_missed=""

for commit in $(git log --reverse "$commits" --pretty=%H)
do
        commit_content=$(git show "$commit")
        if ! echo "$commit_content" | grep damon --quiet
        then
                continue
        fi
        if echo "$commit_content" | grep "Signed-off-by: SeongJae Park" --quiet
        then
                continue
        fi
        if ! git show "$commit" | grep "Reviewed-by: SeongJae Park" --quiet
        then
                review_missed+="$commit "
        fi
done

for commit in $review_missed
do
        desc=$(git log -1 "$commit" --pretty="%h (\"%s\")")
        echo "review missed for $desc"
done
'''

And it indeed found some interesting patches for me:

'''
$ bash commits_to_review.sh mm-stable..mm-new
review missed for cb844296e68a ("mm: introduce CONFIG_ARCH_HAS_LAZY_MMU_MODE")
review missed for 7bc3a776d611 ("mm: add basic tests for lazy_mmu")
review missed for e8dd7a6b54a8 ("mm/damon: fix typos in comments")
review missed for 999d5100ccf7 ("memcg: rename mem_cgroup_ino() to mem_cgroup_id()")
'''

The first two patches are false positives of the script, but the last two
patches were somewhat I actually needed to take more care.  Thanks to Andrew
adding Link: tag to each patch on mm tree, taking the followup action was also
super easy and smooth for me.  I like the results more than I expected, and
decided to keep using the script.

And I now realize this approach would also work for people who didn't list
their name on MAINTAINERS but still looking for patches to review.

Even though the idea and the script may not work for others, I just wanted to
share this, only hoping it helps finding another idea, whatever other than the
Patchwork [1].

[1] No offence but a joke, Pedro ;)  Sorry if it was not funny.


Thanks,
SJ

[...]