Re: Sashiko review email for kvm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx?

From: Sean Christopherson

Date: Tue May 19 2026 - 16:26:21 EST


+KVM and LKML, which I stupidly forgot to Cc :-(

On Tue, May 19, 2026, Janosch Frank wrote:
> On 5/19/26 02:18, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> > Hello people with a MAINTAINERS entry that uses kvm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx as a mailing list!
> >
> > How would y'all feel about enabling Sashiko[*] emails for kvm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx? For
> > a variety of reasons, Sashiko currently only logs its reviews to https://sashiko.dev
> > by default. If subsystems want to receive on-list mails, they need to opt-in.
> >
> > I really, really want to enable email reviews for KVM x86, as Sashiko has found
> > an almost embarassing number of bugs that (a) would have been painful to debug
> > had they escaped review and (b) I'm not convinced would have been found by
> > traditional review. And for me at least the signal:noise ratio is more than good
> > enough. There are still hallucinations and false positives from time to time,
> > but the good outweighs the bad by quite a bit, it's cathartic to flame AI when
> > it's wrong, and worst case scenario I can simply ignore Sashiko.
> >
> > But, currently Sashiko is only capable of making decisions based on mailing list,
> > i.e. as things stand, _all_ of kvm@ needs to opt-in. Before I badger Roman to
> > add bespoke logic to Sashiko's email flow, e.g. to special case KVM x86 in some
> > way, I want to see if there's a general consensus in favor (or against) enabling
> > review emails.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > [*] https://github.com/sashiko-dev/sashiko
>
> Sure,
^
|- This

> as long as there will be no mails from Sashiko or at most one mail per thread.

is in conflict with the caveats here, as per-patch email is exactly what I am
proposing (the current state is that Sashiko never sends mails).

> I'd appreciate something like "I found problems in this thread, here's the
> link, go look if you want to".

While this would be easier than manually searching through the web site, there
would still be a sizeable barrier between contributors/maintainers and Sashiko
feedback. E.g. to click through an out-of-band source, copy+paste the response
into the original thread, etc.

What are your concerns with per-patch email? Hallucinations and noise are
definitely a potential problem, but IMO that can be handled by per-subsystem
policy. E.g. if the signal:noise ratio is particularly poor for a subsystem,
that subsystem can document/state that responding to, or even reading, Sashiko
mails is completely optional.

Beyond that, I'm struggling to understand why folks are opposed to getting mails
from Sashiko, especially for a list as large as kvm@. As others pointed out, the
volume for kvm@ is already high, and it's trivially easy to create a filter for
mails from sashiko-bot@xxxxxxxxxx. I.e. it seems highly unlikely that mail from
Sashiko will require anyone to significantly rethink and/or rework their workflow,
whereas the web site approach is very disruptive to email-based review, at least
for me.