Re: Some clarifications on the upstreaming process

Hi Steffen,

On 10/09/2026 10:17, Steffen Klassert wrote:

On Wed, Sep 09, 2026 at 12:22:14PM +0200, Matthieu Baerts wrote:

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On 09/09/2026 11:23, Paolo Abeni wrote:

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On 9/9/26 8:38 AM, Steffen Klassert wrote:

(...)

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This is the biggest
issue, I see the Sashiko review only after I sent a pull request.
This makes the upstreaming process complicated and delays fixes
quite a bit. I requested some infrastructure from the LF to get
this fixed, but no answer so far. Any other ideas how to fix
this issue?

I think are 2 separate points:

4.1 missing sashiko reviews on edge cases
4.2 difficulty to reproduce the sashiko/clashiko review process in advance.

WRT 4.1 things should generally improve over time, with the exception of
patch that do not apply. I think we can't do much for them, but they
also should not matter much, right?

WRT 4.2 the current guidance is to run AI reviews before submission.
Sashiko could be installed and run locally. The nipa instance (clashiko)
is slighly more effective than sashiko.dev because it runs several
recent models and its result are indeed hard to replicate locally/in
advance.

Clashiko currently runs on (very significant) meta-sponsored budget, I
think it would be hard to extend it's usage to netdev's subsystems.

We might need to find a solution for the subsystems for this 4th point.
I have the same issue with MPTCP, and it seems it is the same with
Netfilter (and likely others) from what I saw. I would prefer to have
Clashiko reviews before applying patches on my side: to reduce the risk
to deal with new issues later on, and to let the author dealing with
that (instead of me days/weeks after).

Right, patches must get the review before they get applied to
a git tree, not after. It was always like that and we should
try to get back to it. The current workflow feels broken from
a submaintainers point of view. The submaintaners are now the
bottleneck.

Indeed, same here.

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From what I understood, Clashiko is still being tweaked, and that's the

current priority. Maybe later, subsystems can have their patches
reviewed by Clashiko as well?

That's what I would hope for.

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If that's a budget issue that cannot be solved easily, I wonder if
Clashiko shouldn't ignore subsystems patches: I see its value, but I
also see the cost for the different subsystems :-/

Maybe we can work with a compromise in the meantime. Clashiko
reviews all subsystem patches that apply to net or net-next
when the patches are submitted to the list as it is now.
But then the subsystem pull requests are done without
resending all patches to the list. So patches do not get
reviewed again with the pull request. That would avoid the
hassle with reviews of already applied patches.

I guess that could work for you because ipsec specific patches are sent
to the same list, but not for subsystems with dedicated mailing lists.
In our case, new features and complex fixes are usually discussed there
first, with potentially multiple revisions, before being sent to netdev.

Cheers,
Matt
-- 
Sponsored by the NGI0 Core fund.