Enjoy the Summer!

Enjoy the Summer!

[Christian Brauner]

Hey!

Summer is here and many core developers and maintainers will be taking
vacations during July and August. I hope everyone gets some
well-deserved rest and recharge and can step away from the fray a little
bit.

The VFS tree will remain open but expect delays in patch processing.
Please don't spam our few overloaded maintainers and reviewers
unnecessarily.

As with other subsystems we see a lot of AI generated patches and bug
reports (publicly and off-list) where the submitter functions like the
Mouth of Sauron. This is not acceptable and such patches will either be
ignored or heavily deprioritized.

In general, over-the-wall, vibe-coded, complex RFC submissions can never
be expected to get lenghty, in-depth reviews especially if the submitter
shows clear signs of not having actually spent the time to think things
through or doesn't understand what they are working on. This is just
taking up valuable development and review time.

Throwing mountains of code or an endless firehose of tiny patches over
the wall to get your name into the kernel is not a success story.

On a postivie note, the last months review discipline has improved quite
a bit in my opinion. But I want to emphasize once more that regular
contributors especially with lenghty submissions to the subsystem are
expected to take part in review.

Review doesn't have to only mean "look for memory leaks". We know that
LLMs are suprisingly good at finding various issues. They have no taste
however. So review should focus on maintainability and design with the
longevity of the subsystem in mind - both internal and external apis.

Keep up the good work and enjoy the summer!
Christian

Re: Enjoy the Summer!

[Darrick J. Wong]

On Fri, Jul 03, 2026 at 05:34:52PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:
> Hey!
> 
> Summer is here and many core developers and maintainers will be taking
> vacations during July and August. I hope everyone gets some
> well-deserved rest and recharge and can step away from the fray a little
> bit.
> 
> The VFS tree will remain open but expect delays in patch processing.
> Please don't spam our few overloaded maintainers and reviewers
> unnecessarily.

<nod>

> As with other subsystems we see a lot of AI generated patches and bug
> reports (publicly and off-list) where the submitter functions like the
> Mouth of Sauron. This is not acceptable and such patches will either be
> ignored or heavily deprioritized.
> 
> In general, over-the-wall, vibe-coded, complex RFC submissions can never
> be expected to get lenghty, in-depth reviews especially if the submitter
> shows clear signs of not having actually spent the time to think things
> through or doesn't understand what they are working on. This is just
> taking up valuable development and review time.
> 
> Throwing mountains of code or an endless firehose of tiny patches over
> the wall to get your name into the kernel is not a success story.
> 
> On a postivie note, the last months review discipline has improved quite
> a bit in my opinion.

I'm glad to hear this!

>                      But I want to emphasize once more that regular
> contributors especially with lenghty submissions to the subsystem are
> expected to take part in review.
> 
> Review doesn't have to only mean "look for memory leaks". We know that
> LLMs are suprisingly good at finding various issues. They have no taste
> however. So review should focus on maintainability and design with the
> longevity of the subsystem in mind - both internal and external apis.

+1

FWIW, $LLM has been quite good at finding coding errors in xfs and
xfsprogs.  However, I observed that as soon as I started asking it to
review design documentation and to examine maintainability, the tone of
the emitted output switched from cloying to redditsnark ("I wouldn't
call this **good**..."). :P

> Keep up the good work and enjoy the summer!

You as well!

--D