Re: Introduce Sashiko (agentic review of Linux kernel changes)

[Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>]

+Venkatesh and Paolo

On Thu, Mar 19, 2026, Roman Gushchin wrote:
> "Lorenzo Stoakes (Oracle)" <ljs@kernel.org> writes:
> > On Wed, Mar 18, 2026 at 11:33:22AM -0700, Roman Gushchin wrote:
> >> >> Finally, some subsystems have a good prompts coverage and some don't. It
> >> >> doesn't have to be lengthy documentation (and it might actually be
> >> >> counter-productive), but having a small list of things to look at - some
> >> >> high-level concepts which are hard to grasp from the code, etc. - can
> >> >> help a lot with both bug discovery and false positives.
> >> >
> >> > I guess best contributed to Chris's review-prompts repo right?
> >>
> >> Both works for me now, we'll figure out with Chris how to sync our
> >> prompts. The small problem is that we're using various models, tools and
> >> review protocols and barely can test each other's setup. And it's all
> >> very fragile, so it's not exactly trivial.
> >> But we'll figure out something soon.
> > Yeah, part of the fun I guess :)
> >
> >> In general we need to carefully separate instructions (like which tools
> >> to use, which prompts to load etc) from factual data. Then we can easily
> >> use the factual data with various tooling around.

In an offline conversation, Venkatesh had a very (IMO) insightful observation
regarding the factual data of the prompts: the information is also very useful
documentation for *humans*.  And in response to me lamenting about having to
potentially review an external repo, Venkatesh also suggested putting the gory
details about subsystem behavior in the kernel's Documentation/.

To me, that suggestion seems like a no brainer.  The existing subject matter
experts are already in place to review and help maintain the documentation, the
documentation can be updated in lockstep with the code, those of us that like
email-based review don't need to change our ways, etc. :-)

And irrespective of AI domination, I'd love to have detailed documenation of some
of KVM's gnarlier internals.  If AI review is what gets us the staffing/motivation
to write and maintain that documentation, then so be it.  It would be a shame if
some of the most comprehensive documentation for the kernel is buried in AI
specific prompts.

Naively, synchronizing from Documentation to model-specific bots doesn't seem
like it'd be a hard problem to solve.