Contributing¶
We welcome external contributions. Please open an issue to discuss your changes
first—especially for larger features—and submit your pull request against the
develop branch.
If you are unsure about opening an issue, feel free to reach out on Slack for initial feedback.
Legal Requirements¶
License¶
By contributing to Kokkos Core, you agree that your contribution will be licensed under the Apache License 2.0 with LLVM Exception. This exception allows Kokkos to be compiled and linked into binaries (including closed-source commercial software) without requiring the end-user to distribute the Kokkos license text. See the LICENSE for details. Contributors (or their employers) retain copyright on their own contributions.
Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO)¶
To ensure clear chain of custody for open-source software, we require all contributions to be “signed off” according to the Developer Certificate of Origin.
By adding a Signed-off-by line to your commit message, you certify that
you have the right to submit the work under the project’s license.
If using the command line, you can automate this by adding the -s flag:
git commit -s -m "My informative commit message"
If you are using a Git GUI or web interface, you must manually type the line at the very end of your commit description:
Signed-off-by: Jane Doe <jane.doe@example.com>
Generative AI and Assisted-By Contributions¶
The use of Generative AI tools (such as GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, or similar models) to assist in writing code for Kokkos is permitted under strict conditions of human oversight and transparency.
Human Accountability: AI-generated code often contains subtle logic bugs, security risks, or licensing compliance issues. Because AI tools cannot sign a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO), you remain fully responsible for every line of code you submit. You must thoroughly review, test, and understand all AI-assisted contributions before submitting them.
Attribution and Disclosure:
To maintain a clear and transparent history of how code is authored, any
commit that contains a significant amount of code generated or heavily modified
by an AI tool must include an Assisted-By trailer in the commit message.
This trailer should specify the tool name and version used, placed directly alongside
your Signed-off-by line.
Fix out-of-bounds error in View layout initialization
Detailed explanation of the fix goes here...
Assisted-By: Copilot:gpt-4o
Signed-off-by: Jane Doe <jane.doe@example.com>
Submissions generated entirely by automated AI agents without active human oversight and code review are strictly prohibited.
Contributing Documentation¶
Please see the README for general instructions on building the documentation.
To make it easier to contribute API documentation, we have a page of documentation templates here