Methodology

There are also cases where the subsystem maintainer is pulling rather than applying patches from the mailing list. Then, the measured latency reflects delays in the submitter's organisation. As an extreme example, the changes to the sfc network driver that went into 3.12 will have a measured latency of up to 11 months (developed against simulated hardware but needed testing against the real thing before submission) whereas the real latency of netdev and David Miller is usually under a week.