“Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

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Not that I have any idea if that's the case here, but I've worked in places like that. Idiotic approach.

I can 100% understand the concern here.

Possibly there is some sort of internal corporate metric or just personal bragging rights get tied to these kinds of patches. It costs the company nothing to incentivize this and the maintainers get all the work associated with it.

Like all metrics "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." (Goodhart's law). There's really no reason for huawei to change other than for the maintainers to ask them to not do that thing.

I recall a talk from a maintainer once gave at some company (I forget where). He detailed what kind of patches get accepted and what don't. They were pretty straight forward standards, some more obvious than others (you know ... say what the patch does accurately).

It wasn't stated but he clearly expected some level of professionalism or just efficiency from the folks giving him work to look through their code on behalf of their company.

I don't think that's too much to expect.

In some companies, the amount of patents or Linux kernel patches you get accepted is direct measure of your success.

As you know, whatever you measure becomes a target -- these guys feel very pressed to get ANY kernel commits accepted, no matter how small, irrelevant or nonsensical. Because in the very end almost nobody sees the amount of value that a company creates for Linux users. What everybody is looking at is that "Company X is nth on the list of biggest kernel contributors".

So "KPI grabbing" is meant to mean the practice of not caring for the value or quality of your contributions but rather for the count of the commits or LoC you can get accepted.

This is damaging to Linux kernel developer community because it just creates work for maintainers without creating much or any value at all.

These maintainers are absolutely critical resource for the project and their number and availability translates directly to how much stuff can actually be done. So no wonder people are irked by it.