The use of LLM assistants for kernel development

Summary

By Jonathan CorbetAugust 7, 2025 By some appearances, at least, the kernel community has been relatively insulated from the onslaught of AI-driven software-development tools. There has not been a flood of vibe-coded memory-management patches — yet. But kernel development is, in the end, software development, and these tools threaten to change many aspects of how software development is done. In a world where companies are actively pushing their developers to use these tools, it is not surprising that the topic is increasingly prominent in kernel circles as well. There are currently a number of ongoing discussions about how tools based on large language models (LLMs) fit into the kernel-development community. Arguably, the current round of debate began with this article on a presentation by Sasha Levin at the Open Source Summit North America in June; his use of an LLM to generate a kernel patch came as a surprise to some developers, including the maintainer who accepted that patch. Since then, David Alan Gilbert has posted a patch proposing requirements for the disclosure of LLM use in kernel development. Levin has posted a series of his own focused on providing configurations for coding assistants and guidelines for their use. Both of these submissions have provoked discussions ranging beyond their relatively narrow objectives. Gilbert suggested the use of a new patch tag, Generated-by, to identify a tool that was used to create a kernel patch; that tag would be expected not just for LLM-generated patches, but also patches from long-accepted tools like Coccinelle. Levin, instead, suggests using the existing Co-developed-by tag, but takes pains to point out that an LLM should not add the Signed-off-by tag that normally is required alongside Co-developed-by. Either way, the suggestion is the addition of information to the tags section of any patch that was generated by an LLM-based tool. A step back While much of the discussion jumped directly into the details of thes...