Open Source Summit + ELC Europe 2018

Building stable trees is difficult; we are required to find only commits that fix bugs (needle) in the massive flow of commits that go upstream (haystack).

Currently the process is based on authors and maintainers tagging their commits properly and helping stable maintainers to know that they should be picking up these patches.

However, this doesn't always happen right. Commits get lost, forgotten, or never looked at to begin with. This means that important fixes are being left out of stable trees and not reaching the users who rely on stable trees for fixes.

This talk with go over a new approach to detect bug fixing commits in the kernel tree using machine learning, and demonstrate how it was used to submit over a thousand commits to various stable trees.