An Investigation of Patch Porting Practices of the Linux Kernel Ecosystem
Xingyu Li, Zheng Zhang, Zhiyun Qian, Trent Jaeger, Chengyu Song

TL;DR
This study analyzes patch porting practices in the Linux Kernel ecosystem, revealing diverse strategies, their tradeoffs, and the importance of hinting tags, with recommendations to improve patch propagation efficiency.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of Linux patch porting practices across multiple distributions and proposes actionable recommendations for enhancing patch flow.
Findings
Diverse patch porting strategies exist with different tradeoffs.
Hinting tags significantly improve patch porting promptness.
Many patches lack indicative hinting tags, affecting responsiveness.
Abstract
Open-source software is increasingly reused, complicating the process of patching to repair bugs. In the case of Linux, a distinct ecosystem has formed, with Linux mainline serving as the upstream, stable or long-term-support (LTS) systems forked from mainline, and Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu and Android, as downstreams forked from stable or LTS systems for end-user use. Ideally, when a patch is committed in the Linux upstream, it should not introduce new bugs and be ported to all the applicable downstream branches in a timely fashion. However, several concerns have been expressed in prior work about the responsiveness of patch porting in this Linux ecosystem. In this paper, we mine the software repositories to investigate a range of Linux distributions in combination with Linux stable and LTS, and find diverse patch porting strategies and competence levels that help explain the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Data Storage Technologies · Distributed and Parallel Computing Systems · Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies
