Re: Stop false review statements

[Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>]

On Sun, May 17, 2026 at 12:29:12PM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:
> It should also be noted that Intel's zero-day bot was (a) closed
> source, and (b) was sending its test regression reports with the
> linux-kernel mailing list cc'ed, and no one really complained because
> it was so useful, and if Intel was willing to use very expensive
> hardware in their data center to contribute reports, so long as the
> reports were useful and the false-positive noise was low enough, we
> decided to be grateful and not worry (too much) about the fact that
> Intel's zero-day bot was closed source.  (There was indeed some
> grumbling in the bar at Plumbers, of course.  :-)

The 0-day but was a closed-source front-end to orchestrate analysis
tools that are open-source (compilers, static analyzers, ...). Sashiko
is an open-source front-end to orchestrate analysis tools that are
closed-source. That's the complete opposite, so I'm not sure how
relevant the comparison is. Comparing with Coverity may be more
relevant.

> In my opinion, we should be doing the same for Sashiko, and that's the
> decision which the ext4 developers have made --- at least for ext4
> patches, after an experiment where we only sent reviews to the patch
> authors and the maintainer, people were satisifed that false positive
> rate was low enough (with the caveats that I had previously mentioned,
> but we were willing to live with them because at least for us, it was
> useful enough), that we will be requesting that Sashiko reviews be
> cc'ed to the ext4 mailing list.
> 
> I realize that there are some extra sensitivities around AI / LLM's,
> but from the perspective of reviewing patches, I don't see any
> difference between this and other closed source tools that we've used,
> such as Coverity and the Zero-day bot.  Not everyone will agree, of
> course, but at the moment, this is a decision that we are making on a
> subsystem by subsystem basis, which again, has strong historical
> precedence.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart