Exploring Semantic Stability Across Reviews in the Linux Kernel

Code review is credited with substantially changing a patch's code between its first submission and the version that eventually lands. However, prior work typically studied only the final merged patch without comparing it to the first submission. We present a function-level measurement that tracks 10,117 trajectories (each function followed across the numbered revisions of one patch series) through the patch history of the Linux IIO subsystem, comparing similarity scores against unrelated function pairs as a baseline. A naive reading yields near-total similarity, but this is largely an artifact of composition: 75.3% of tracked trajectories are never textually modified between versions, co...

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