[ANN] Summer vacations and "Won't Fix" bugs

[Alexei Starovoitov]

Hi Everyone,

The summer is upon us and many BPF maintainers are going to take very
long vacations "surprisingly" at the same time during July and August.

As signs on freeways say: "Expect delays" in patch processing and
please don't spam few overloaded maintainers and reviewers.

We see a lot of AI generated patches where human took AI generated bug
finding, AI produced a patch and human sent it to the list without
much thinking since AI "bug" sounded real and AI "patch" looked legit.
This is not cool. It doesn't move the BPF project forward. It's a
wheel spin and a noise in the long run. 3 out of 4 such patches are
wrong. They consume maintainer's time and distract from real bugs and
features. Don't be the one who spreads AI slop. Submitters must
review such patches first. Use another LLM to review it and ask "Does
this need to be fixed?" If it's a race condition and the reproducer
requires adding mdelay() to the kernel the chances of hitting such a
bug are the same as HW crashing due to cosmic rays. Typical solar
flares cause more kernel crashes in the datacenter than these bugs.
These are "Won't Fix" bugs.

Similarly a patch to fix a "bug" without a reproducer is going to be
ignored, because it's a sign that AI couldn't craft a reproducer and
description of the "bug" is a hallucination. No matter how plausible
it sounds.

We see newcomers sending such AI slop to multiple subsystems at the
same time (netdev, bpf, etc). It's a red flag and a sign that the
submitter has no depth in either area. They are merely forwarding AI
to the list. Such patches are the lowest priority and might be
ignored.

Landing 100 patches to fix 100 never-in-real-life bugs is not a
success story. Lines-of-code and number-of-patches-landed is not a
metric that businesses evaluate employees over. Expect more "Won't Fix".
Maintainers are not going to help you increase these pointless metrics.

Also developers who sent 10+ patches are no longer occasional
contributors they _must_ review other patches.  See
https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/CAADnVQ+TKKptnNB25V3=bcdybh5G6c2DyW2sYtXvyRaVnPN8MA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
"As a prerequisite for merging a patch, the submitting developer is
expected to complete a comprehensive review of another developer's
patch of comparable scope and complexity."

If you don't review other patches and merely forward AI to the list
expect that your patches will be ignored.

Have a great summer.