Merge-Tree: Visualizing the Integration of Commits into Linux
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With an average of more than 900 top-level merges into the Linux kernel per release, many containing hundreds of commits and some containing thousands, maintenance of older versions of the kernel becomes nearly impossible. Various commercial products, such as the Android platform, run older versions of the kernel. Due to security, performance, and changing hardware needs, maintainers must understand what changes (commits) are added to the current version of the kernel since the last time they inspected it in order to make the necessary patches. Current tools provide information about repositories through the directed acyclic graph (DAG) of the repository, which is helpful for smaller projects. However, with the scale and number of branches in the kernel the DAG becomes overwhelming very quickly. Furthermore, the DAG contains every ancestor of every commit, while maintainers are more interested in how and when a commit arrives to the official Linux repository. In this paper, we propose the merge-tree, a simplified transformation of the DAG of the Linux git repository that shows the way in which commits are merged into the master branch of Linux. Using the merge-tree, we build Linvis, a tool that is designed to allow users to explore how commits are merged into the Linux kernel.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".