Toward a policy for machine-learning tools in kernel development

The first topic of discussion at the 2025 Maintainers Summit has been in the air for a while: what role — if any — should machine-learning-based tools have in the kernel development process? While there has been a fair amount of controversy around these tools, and concerns remain, it seems that the kernel community, or at least its high-level maintainership, is comfortable with these tools becoming a significant part of the development process.
2025 年 Maintainers Summit 的第一个讨论主题其实已经酝酿了一段时间：基于机器学习的工具在内核开发流程中究竟应该扮演什么角色（如果有的话）？尽管围绕这些工具存在不少争议，相关担忧也依然存在，但内核社区——至少是高层维护者——似乎已经接受这些工具将成为开发流程中一个重要组成部分。

Sasha Levin began the discussion by pointing to a summary he had sent to the mailing lists a few days before. There is some consensus, he said, that human accountability for patches is critical, and that use of a large language model in the creation of a patch does not change that. Purely machine-generated patches, without human involvement, are not welcome. Maintainers must retain the authority to accept or reject machine-generated contributions as they see fit. And, he said, there is agreement that the use of tools should be disclosed in some manner.
Sasha Levin 以他几天前发到邮件列表的一份总结作为讨论的开场。他表示，大家在一些问题上已经达成共识：补丁必须有人类负责，使用大语言模型来生成补丁并不会改变这一点。完全由机器生成、没有任何人工参与的补丁是不受欢迎的。维护者必须保留根据自身判断接受或拒绝机器生成贡献的权力。此外，大家也普遍同意，应当以某种方式披露工具的使用情况。

Just tools?

只是工具吗？

But, he asked the group: is there agreement in general that these tools are, in the end, just more tools? Steve Rostedt said that LLM-generated code may bring legal concerns that other tools do not raise, but Greg Kroah-Hartman answered that the current developers certificate of origin ("Signed-off-by") process should cover the legal side of things.
但他也向与会者提问：大家是否总体上同意，这些工具最终不过是“更多的工具”？Steve Rostedt 表示，LLM 生成的代码可能带来其他工具不会引发的法律风险；而 Greg Kroah-Hartman 回应称，现有的开发者来源证明（DCO，即 “Signed-off-by”）流程应该已经覆盖了法律层面的责任问题。

Rostedt agreed that the submitter is ultimately on the hook for the code they contribute, but he wondered about the possibility of some court ruling that a given model violates copyright years after the kernel had accepted code it generated. That would create the need for a significant cleanup effort.
Rostedt 同意提交者最终要对自己提交的代码负责，但他担心一种可能性：在内核已经接受了某个模型生成的代码多年之后，法院裁定该模型侵犯了版权。这种情况下，内核可能需要进行一次规模巨大的清理工作。

Ted Ts'o said that people worry about the copyright problems, but those same problems exist even in the absence of these tools. Developers could, for example, submit patches without going through the processes required by their employer — patches which, as a