Re: [RFC 0/5] LLMinus: LLM-Assisted Merge Conflict Resolution

Sasha Levin
2025-12-23T12:36:20Z

On Mon, Dec 22, 2025 at 02:50:55PM +0000, Mark Brown wrote:
>On Sun, Dec 21, 2025 at 11:10:11AM -0500, Sasha Levin wrote:
>
>> I assigned categories to the various trees used by -next (see
>> https://gist.github.com/sashalevin/163df4ae1163e0e22a97edc40e14b7f5) and built
>> a simple wrapper script to generate per-category integration branches, letting
>> LLMinus resolve conflicts whenever we hit one.
>
>Those categories appear to be a bit randomly assigned FWIW. I'm not

There should be some sense there :) but yes, we could fine tune it as we go.

>clear who would want the various intermediate merges either, I suppose
>that having some of the trees pulled into multiple places might help
>shake out some of the issues due to things getting sent to Linus in a
>different order but OTOH it will increase the total number of merges
>done and tested which is itself a cost. We could also shake out
>ordering issues by doing something like randomise the ordering. I think
>I'd want some demand or use case for doing more intermediate merges
>rather than just doing a bunch of them for the sake of it.

My thinking around it was to enable faster per-subsystem tests than what we
currently do. For example, we can quickly build mm-next and run mm focused
tests on it.

Since creating these per-subsystem trees is fairly cheap and can happen even
few times a day, we can help identify issues way earlier during the process.

>This seems like a very separate experiment to your LLM merge thing.

Right, just going off on a tangent based on the Maintainer's summit feedback of
how useful fs-next is.

>> The resulting branches were pushed to
>> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/sashal/linux-next.git/refs/ .
>> Each category has a %s-next branch, and a larger all-next branch which merges
>> all of them together and is the equivalent of linux-next.
>
>> Please let me know what you think!
>
>It might be easier to tell what it's done if you ran this with the same
>inputs as the last -next (it's on Christmas break at the minute),
>there's quite large differences in the end result but most if not all of
>that is that the input trees you're using are fresher than the last
>-next. Though I think even with the same base there'd be a bit of a
>needle in a haystack thing finding interesting cases, probably it'd be
>more useful to find and highlight specific cases where it does something
>interesting.

Yup, I figured I'd wait until break is over and compare the trees once the next
linux-next is released.

--
Thanks,
Sasha