A later message claims (outraged at being accused of submitting intentionally broken code to the kernel, despite having previously done exactly that) that the patch was generated by a static analysis tool. Ok, what tool? How did you run it? The message where he claims this has since been deleted (by who? Edit: probably never sent to the list, see below) but here is a message from Greg KH which quotes it:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/YH%2FfM%2FTsbmcZzwnX@kroah...
You can see that Greg KH is skeptical that the patch was generated by a tool. It’s also unclear to me if the patch is actually harmless or not. It would be good to get some definitive clarity on that but the lkml discussion of it seems inconclusive.
I would add that the student’s tone in this message feels really familiar as an open source maintainer: this is the tone of someone doing something they know is bad being called out on it and trying to deflect with outrage. The last time I got that tone, it was someone who had created multiple sock puppet accounts to try to discredit my project and force moderators to reverse or apologize for a (completely justified and mild) moderation action. So I can’t help but feel that something fishy is going on here and the UMN research group still isn’t being honest about it.