From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from smtp.kernel.org (aws-us-west-2-korg-mail-1.web.codeaurora.org [10.30.226.201]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by smtp.subspace.kernel.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id CA8FA35028C; Mon, 16 Mar 2026 22:57:58 +0000 (UTC) Authentication-Results: smtp.subspace.kernel.org; arc=none smtp.client-ip=10.30.226.201 ARC-Seal:i=1; a=rsa-sha256; d=subspace.kernel.org; s=arc-20240116; t=1773701878; cv=none; b=AjUNFH2jvGq8l3EzeX4JN+2Ffh2gMxrj46EKp7Il2z8ZAhMFG+EIh4S0p3DORtu7+hMh0rrU5P8qij1c51JyYO/7CRTCYzXuCeBkcKduO36LoIlqroT2voapv7XoStZaLu2/Qwj86FkXnGsbBQgDisUYX2j+OgvbPYbGkONb1Oc= ARC-Message-Signature:i=1; a=rsa-sha256; d=subspace.kernel.org; s=arc-20240116; t=1773701878; c=relaxed/simple; bh=mEnlDtD+uMXBaY3t2IfkmLKFopSN2YDt1ilz6+WKW4U=; h=Date:From:To:Cc:Subject:Message-ID:In-Reply-To:References: MIME-Version:Content-Type; b=Vu7xdIW5UxGQMMrJ5XOdy27SluBTkn49II5s8nY7NNTlOJ8Dru7UVX0sPPy9La+DlsEEHByA6rCZtAzGsRMn697SSIRvM8q2zxtN/MLCAXgEBHXlN7K8T7JhT7HkMIBWGk3hdINK/E3XNteVgHo2bhQjenwT9ssO2qxooowO2fY= ARC-Authentication-Results:i=1; smtp.subspace.kernel.org; dkim=pass (2048-bit key) header.d=kernel.org header.i=@kernel.org header.b=dYytfHIU; arc=none smtp.client-ip=10.30.226.201 Authentication-Results: smtp.subspace.kernel.org; dkim=pass (2048-bit key) header.d=kernel.org header.i=@kernel.org header.b="dYytfHIU" Received: by smtp.kernel.org (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 16B5CC19421; Mon, 16 Mar 2026 22:57:57 +0000 (UTC) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/simple; d=kernel.org; s=k20201202; t=1773701878; bh=mEnlDtD+uMXBaY3t2IfkmLKFopSN2YDt1ilz6+WKW4U=; h=Date:From:To:Cc:Subject:In-Reply-To:References:From; b=dYytfHIUOzat5FH4iDWFKQ+0LqEBB/CopaYZWcxqPfMn6TDVJ5aH2m7e7b6i2uI+G njfJqsJHJEfJczHdFp+9mf+HI3bQ1IsCULV7Za2wDaYAEj9Fo0kh8Pi7OuDertqPRS Rl0/jJqSngDaNVj6stP+jWC41xXtSehkjltX63SMWOlUwrzAnPwCmSA2iV+L1CjHhA LnNsPapvzaV6qITwziVvpn7+IND6I895QjO8R0ZPpEt5pxkemP75Fgna1R/Tbpw178 fu0AaoYy8JiT2wSC0G1wnhYdgF9IahedQfdKYUX95VoEM5I5nt2m650V/+QJ3gT5aZ kaEqPojDY5xFA== Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:57:56 -0700 From: Jakub Kicinski To: Dmitry Vyukov Cc: syzkaller , Sasha Levin , linux-api@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-doc@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kbuild@vger.kernel.org, linux-kselftest@vger.kernel.org, workflows@vger.kernel.org, tools@kernel.org, x86@kernel.org, Thomas Gleixner , "Paul E. McKenney" , Greg Kroah-Hartman , Jonathan Corbet , Randy Dunlap , Cyril Hrubis , Kees Cook , Jake Edge , David Laight , Askar Safin , Gabriele Paoloni , Mauro Carvalho Chehab , Christian Brauner , Alexander Viro , Andrew Morton , Masahiro Yamada , Shuah Khan , Ingo Molnar , Arnd Bergmann Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/9] Kernel API Specification Framework Message-ID: <20260316155756.25b985f5@kernel.org> In-Reply-To: References: <20260313150928.2637368-1-sashal@kernel.org> <20260314111822.63a2ba4a@kernel.org> Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit On Mon, 16 Mar 2026 08:05:53 +0100 Dmitry Vyukov wrote: > On Sat, 14 Mar 2026 at 19:18, Jakub Kicinski wrote: > > On Fri, 13 Mar 2026 11:09:10 -0400 Sasha Levin wrote: > > > This enables static analysis tools to verify userspace API usage at compile > > > time, test generation based on formal specifications, consistent error handling > > > validation, automated documentation generation, and formal verification of > > > kernel interfaces. > > > > Could you give some examples? We have machine readable descriptions for > > Netlink interfaces, we approached syzbot folks and they did not really > > seem to care for those. > > I think our reasoning wrt syzkaller was that not all interfaces in all > relevant kernels are described with netlink yml descriptions, so we > need to continue using the extraction of interfaces from the source > code. And if we have that code, then using yml as an additional data > source only adds code/complexity. Additionally, we may extract some > extra constraints/info from code that are not present in yml. > > Realistically system call descriptions may have the same problem for > us at this point, since we extract lots of info from the source code > already: > https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/syzkaller/refs/heads/master/sys/linux/auto.txt yup! we haven't tried to make the yml spec super useful to syzbot to be fair. I'm just flagging that example because in our case we quickly went from "this will obviously be useful to syzbot" to "although we could, it may not be super practical" > (and LLMs obviously can allow us to extract more) Didn't even think of that. LLMs should make short work of this sort of extraction of information from source code..