Greg Kroah-Hartman Tests New 'Clanker T1000' Fuzzing Tool for Linux Patches

The word clanker — a disparaging term for AI and robots — "has made its way into the Linux kernel," reports the blog It's FOSS "thanks to Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux stable kernel maintainer and the closest thing the project has to a second-in-command." He's been quietly running what looks like an AI-assisted fuzzing tool on the kernel that lives in a branch called "clanker" on his working kernel tree. It began with the ksmbd and SMB code. Kroah-Hartman filed a three-patch series after running his new tooling against it, describing the motivation quite simply. ["They pass my very limited testing here," he wrote, "but please don't trust them at all and verify that I'm not just making this all up before accepting them."] Kroah-Hartman picked that code because it was easy to set up and test locally with virtual machines.
"Beyond those initial SMB/KSMBD patches, there have been a flow of other Linux kernel patches touching USB, HID, F2FS, LoongArch, WiFi, LEDs, and more," Phoronix wrote Tuesday, "that were done by Greg Kroah-Hartman in the past 48 hours.... Those patches in the "Clanker" branch all note as part of the Git tag: "Assisted-by: gregkh_clanker_t1000"

The T1000 presumably in reference to the Terminator T-1000.
It's FOSS emphasizes that "What Kroah-Hartman appears to be doing here is not having AI write kernel code. The fuzzer surfaces potential bugs; a human with decades of kernel experience reviews them, writes the actual fixes, and takes responsibility for what gets submitted." Linus has been thinking about this too. Speaking at Open Source Summit Japan last year, Linus Torvalds said the upcoming Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit will address "expanding our tooling and our policies when it comes to using AI for tooling."

He also mentioned running an internal AI experiment where the tool reviewed a merge he had objected to. The AI not only agreed with his objections but found additional issues to fix. Linus called that a good sign, while asserting that he is "much less interested in AI for writing code" and more interested in AI as a tool for maintenance, patch checking, and code review.

Now this ...

[PPH]

... is where AI shines. Perusing thousands (millions?) of lines of code, tirelessly looking for bugs. Where the average human would have dozed off.

The only thing that would make this process even more trustworthy is to have a few subtle bugs thrown in the codebase. To see if clanker avoids the false negative cases.

Re:

[phantomfive]

I was thinking the same thing. If there are bugs in the fuzzer, it can actually improve the quality of the fuzzer (since you are trying to break things).

Re: Now this ...

[Thelasko]

We do something similar on one of my teams. Instead of going through the entire codebase we have it review merge requests for bugs. It's like having a 10x developer in code reviews. Ultimately it's up to humans to accept our reject the merge request.

Re:

[gweihir]

Do not expect too much. The main use is to make it a bit less likely for people trying to attack the kernel with AI tools to succeed.

Re:

[Zero__Kelvin]

Somebody should invent the feedback loop!

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

The only thing that would make this process even more trustworthy is to have a few subtle bugs thrown in the codebase.

Already taken care of, some guy called Drepper has it covered.

Etymology for Clanker

[crunchy_one]

The word clanker — a disparaging term for AI and robots

I wonder if the word clanker might be related to the word clacker, coined by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling in their novel The Difference Engine? The novel imagines an alternative Victorian-era history where Charles Babbage's mechanical difference engine is successful, giving rise to a mechanical computer revolution in the mid-19th century. A clacker is a programmer, the word deriving from the sound that mechanical computing machines made in operation.

A clanker could be the degenerate sound that AI-generated code would make running on a mechanical computer.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Clanker is a slur in the star wars franchise. There they had humans call robots clankers. The anti AI movement picked that up because of the connotations in phrases like "clanker with hard r".

Clanker

[HnT]

It kinda says a lot about humanity that we have the slur clanker before we have actual clankers..

Re:

[dsgrntlxmply]

When you destroy a malfunctioning clanker by fire, you get clunker clanker clinker.

Story next week

[oumuamua]

What Kroah-Hartman bemoans all this work on Clanker T1000 is now obsolete. Claude Mythos does it better and faster https://www.wired.com/story/an... [wired.com]
I should have named it T-800 because Mythos came and obliterated my work just like T1000 obliterated the T800