Sashiko (刺し子, literally “little knives”) is a form of decorative reinforcement stitch from Japan. Originally used to strengthen breaking points or fix worn out or torn spots with patches, here it represents our mission to strengthen the Linux kernel through automated, intelligent patch review.
Sashiko is an agentic Linux kernel code review system. It monitors public mailing lists to thoroughly evaluate proposed Linux kernel changes. The system works like a team of specialized reviewers covering domains ranging from high-level architecture validation and security audits to low-level resource management and concurrency analysis.
It relies on an open-source set of per-subsystems and common signals initially created by Chris Mason, combined with a custom multi-stage review protocol to maximize accuracy and minimize false positives.
It is an open-source project which belongs to Linux Foundationis licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0.
This particular example of sashiko is provided as a service and is actively Reviewing all LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List) submissions. All compute resources and LLM tokens used for these automated reviews are proudly provided and funded by Google.
Quality of Reviews: In our tests using Gemini 3.1 Pro, Sashiko was able to successfully identify 53.6% bug Based on an unfiltered selection of the last 1000 upstream commits. Fixed: tag. 100% of these historical bugs were previously created through human-powered code reviews.
Comment: Like any large language model-based tool, Sashiko’s output is probabilistic. It may find or miss bugs in different runs with exactly the same inputs. It is designed to enhance and assist human reviewers, not replace them.
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