Mesa

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New Linux Kernel Rules Put The Onus On Humans For AI Tool Usage

April 14, 2026 by 1 Comment

It’s fair to say that the topic of so-called ‘AI coding assistants’ is somewhat controversial. With arguments against them ranging from code quality to copyright issues, there are many valid reasons to be at least hesitant about accepting their output in a project, especially one as massive as the Linux kernel. With a recent update to the Linux kernel documentation the use of these tools has now been formalized.

The upshot of the use of such Large Language Models (LLM) tools is that any commit that uses generated code has to be signed off by a human developer, and this human will ultimately bear responsibility for the code quality as well as any issues that the code may cause, including legal ones. The use of AI tools also has to be declared with the Assisted-by: tag in contributions so that their use can be tracked.

When it comes to other open source projects the approach varies, with NetBSD having banished anything tainted by ‘AI’, cURL shuttering its bug bounty program due to AI code slop, and Mesa’s developers demanding that you understand generated code which you submit, following a tragic slop-cident.

Meanwhile there are also rising concerns that these LLM-based tools may be killing open source through ‘vibe-coding’, along with legal concerns whether LLM-generated code respects the original license of the code that was ingested into the training model. Clearly we haven’t seen the end of these issues yet.

Asahi GPU Hacking

May 16, 2022 by 7 Comments

[Alyssa Rosenzweig] has been tirelessly working on reverse engineering the GPU built into Apple’s M1 architecture as part of the Asahi Linux effort. If you’re not familiar, that’s the project adding support to the Linux kernel and userspace for the Apple M1 line of products. She has made great progress, and even got primitive rendering working with her own open source code, just over a year ago.

Trying to mature the driver, however, has hit a snag. For complex rendering, something in the GPU breaks, and the frame is simply missing chunks of content. Some clever testing discovered the exact failure trigger — too much total vertex data. Put simply, it’s “the number of vertices (geometry complexity) times amount of data per vertex (‘shading’ complexity).” That… almost sounds like a buffer filling up, but on the GPU itself. This isn’t a buffer that the driver directly interacts with, so all of this sleuthing has to be done blindly. The Apple driver doesn’t have corrupted renders like this, so what’s going on?
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