Generation-Side Tooling Outpaces Validation-Side Tooling

The generation side is shipping fast (TileGym, AutoKernel, KernelEvolve). The validation-side surface for “what the kernel actually did at runtime” has not kept pace. TL;DR In the past nine months, three significant releases have landed for auto-generation of CUDA kernels: NVIDIA TileGym , RightNow AutoKernel, and Meta’s KernelEvolve. Each ships training infrastructure for kernel generation. Validation infrastructure (what the generated kernel actually did at runtime, on a real workload, in a production-shaped environment) has not kept the same pace. eBPF traces are the ground-truth layer that closes the gap. What “validation” means at the kernel level Two distinct validation surfaces: Pre-launch: the generated CUDA C compiles, the PTX assembles, the kernel passes a numerical-equivalence test against a reference. Standard compiler / unit-test territory. Generation frameworks ship this themselves. Post-launch: the kernel ran, returned, took N microseconds, used M registers per thread, hit X cache miss rate, and did or did not serialize the rest of the stream behind it. This is the layer that an eBPF trace plus standard CUDA driver counters can answer for any kernel, generated or hand-written. Auto-generation pipelines do not by default close the post-launch loop. They demonstrate “the kernel works in our test setup”. They do not demonstrate “the kernel does not regress p99 latency on production inference traffic”. What an eBPF trace adds to a generated kernel Once a generated kernel is in a real workload, the same trace surface used for any CUDA kernel applies: launch latency from cudaLaunchKernel , sync stalls from cudaStreamSynchronize , host-side overhead from the dispatcher, host scheduling preemption while the GPU is busy. None of those signals are visible to a generation framework that evaluates kernels in isolation. -- post-launch validation: did the new generated kernel regress p99? SELECT kernel_name , COUNT ( * ) AS launches , AVG ( duration_ns ) / 1 e3 AS