No disclosure for LLM-generated patch?

Posted Jun 29, 2025 23:31 UTC (Sun) by sashal (✭ supporter ✭, #81842)
In reply to: No disclosure for LLM-generated patch? by nevets
Parent article: Supporting kernel development with large language models

As the author of hashtable.h, and the person who sent the patch to Steve, I missed it too.

For that matter, the reason I felt comfortable sending this patch out is because I know hashtable.h.

Maybe we should have a tag for tool generated patches, but OTOH we had checkpatch.pl and Coccinelle generated patches for over a decade, so why start now?

Is it an issue with the patch? Sure.

Am I surprised that LWN comments are bikeshedding over a lost __read_mostly? Not really...

No disclosure for LLM-generated patch?

Posted Jun 30, 2025 2:26 UTC (Mon) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link]

For both checkpatch.pl and Coccinelle generated patches, there isn't a tag, but pretty much every case (or it should be every case) it is stated in the change log that the patch was created by a script. You left that out. I've submitted a few Coccinelle generated patches, and every time I not only state that it was produced by Coccinelle, I add to the change log the script that I fed Coccinelle to produce the patch. This allows others to know if I did the script correctly or not.

The missing "__read_mostly" is a red herring. The real issue is transparency. We should not be submitting AI generated patches without explicitly stating how it was generated. As I mentioned. If I had known it was 100% a script, I may have been a bit more critical over the patch. I shouldn't be finding this out by reading LWN articles.