On Thu, Feb 12, 2026 at 05:44:46AM +1000, Dave Airlie wrote: > Hi all, > > This came up at kernel maintainers summit, so I've been trying to see > what I can piece together, and have a small demonstration that may be > useful to some people.
My two cents.. A few years back someone was talking about AI code reviews at a conference and a bunch of us had a good laugh about it. Today what Chris has working is, frankly, pretty amazing and should be taken very seriously. It absolutely finds real problems that are surprisingly complicated. I think it is a much higher value than a tool like Coverity or other prior attempts I've seen at static analysis.. Even if it is often wrong, it is still often *right*. In RDMA land we are also experimenting with Chris's tools. Your approach is also very interesting, I think. At NVIDIA we are trialing some commercial review tools and they are pretty impressive too. I was working on something unrelated and it pointed out a real bug in a kernel driver, then it pointed out several pre-existing stack-leak security bugs too as a drive-by. I thought it reflected a surprisingly sophisticated evaluation of Linux requirements, and it wasn't using Chris's Linux specific aides either. After seeing these reports I used Claude as a super-charged Coccinelle to look for narrow stack leak patterns across ~300 functions and it did a very impressive job identifying the target functions, examining the code, the struct layouts and identifying cases that were actually problematic, largely autonomously, with a two sentence prompt. Found another stack-leak bug this way. This week I've tackled a giant "all driver collateral evolution" type project in RDMA that is well beyond what I could manage with Coccinelle. Using Claude to generate Coccinelle, and do it's own search/replace has been really eye opening what is now possible with surprisingly little effort. It is hard to tell where things will be in a years time, but there has been a big capability improvement over the last year. Interesting times ahead for sure! Jason
