[$] How 4.4's patches got to the mainline

The kernel development community is organized as a hierarchy, withdevelopers submitting patches to maintainers who will, in turn, committhose patches to a repository and push them upstream to higher-level maintainers. Thishierarchy logically looks a lot like the directory hierarchy of the kernelsource itself; most maintainers look after one or more subtrees of thekernel source tree. But does that model really describe how patches makeit into the mainline? The kernel's git repository, with the aid of somescripting, holds an answer to that question.