Learning From Developers: Towards Reliable Patch Validation at Scale for Linux

ArXi:2603.24825v1 Announce Type: cross Patch reviewing is critical for software development, especially in distributed open-source development, which highly depends on voluntary work, such as Linux. This paper studies the past 10 years of patch reviews of the Linux memory management subsystem to characterize the challenges involved in patch reviewing at scale. Our study reveals that the review process is still primarily reliant on human effort despite a wide-range of automatic checking tools.