linux-kernel - Re: Follow-up on Linux-kernel code accessibility

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Message-ID: <20251222104209.15e98861@gandalf.local.home>
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2025 10:42:09 -0500
From: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>
To: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...nel.org>
Cc: Sasha Levin <sashal@...nel.org>, Theodore Tso <tytso@....edu>, Julia
 Lawall <julia.lawall@...ia.fr>, Gabriele Paoloni <gpaoloni@...hat.com>,
 Kate Stewart <kstewart@...uxfoundation.org>, Chuck Wolber
 <chuckwolber@...il.com>, Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@...gle.com>, Mark Rutland
 <mark.rutland@....com>, Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>, Lorenzo
 Stoakes <lorenzo.stoakes@...cle.com>, Shuah Khan
 <skhan@...uxfoundation.org>, Chris Mason <clm@...a.com>,
 linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Follow-up on Linux-kernel code accessibility

On Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:36:33 -0800
"Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...nel.org> wrote:

> > This is one of the motivations I have for modeling the complex portions of
> > the tracing subsystem. I'm hoping that I can see better ways to perform
> > these tasks and possibly even improve its performance.  
> 
> If there are 100,000 function-like things in the kernel, and we add 100
> lines of comments to each, we will have expanded the kernel source by
> some tens of percent.  Plus staleness and/or churn will likely be problems.

I'm really only interested in the more subtle and complex functions. The
majority of those 100,000 functions do not need extra comments.

And I honestly don't care about increasing the source due to comments.
That's a good thing. I like going to a subsystem and seeing a lot of
comments in the code. I hate going to a subsystem where there's no
comments, thus you need to try to figure out the context from the code, and
when I had that, I usually got it wrong.

> 
> Yes, it helped you, and that is good.  But is this really the best way to
> achieve that goal?  Better than human walkthroughs?  Than querying LLMs
> that ingested the code?  Better than producing external documentation
> at the design/code level?

So far I've not been too happy with the results of LLMs describing code.
They tend to come up with the same mistakes I do when I try to figure out
what the author of the code was doing by looking only at the code without
any comments that came from said author.

-- Steve