Re: [PATCH v4 00/10] net: support thread-specific pidfds for send and connect

[Jakub Kicinski]

On Tue, 20 Oct 2026 19:39:20 +0000 Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 16, 2026 at 08:57:32AM -0700, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
> > Konstantin, could you consider adding a b4 option which would
> > make it apply the patches on the most recent Linus release tag
> > and then merge them into current branch as normal?
> > Simpler version is to let the user name the application base.
> > This lets other trees trivially create a branch later if they
> > want to.  
> 
> This was a fairly frequent request, so I made this change now:
> 
>     b4 shazam -M <msgid>
> 
> applies the series on the nearest annotated tag in the history of your current
> branch (e.g. v7.3-rc6), and then merges it into your branch with the cover
> letter as the merge message, just like a pull request. If the series doesn't
> apply cleanly on that tag, or there is no annotated tag, b4 falls back to
> applying on HEAD and tells you why.
> 
> As previously, use -H instead of -M if you just want the result in FETCH_HEAD
> so you can look at it first.
> 
> If you don't want to upgrade to current master, you can already use
> --merge-base to achieve the same effect:
> 
>     b4 shazam -M --merge-base v7.3-rc6 <msgid>
> 
> It takes any commit, branch, or tag. The most recent master also takes a few
> new markers: _tag (the nearest annotated tag, with no fallback to HEAD),
> _specified (the series' own base-commit, which is what -M used before), and
> _guess (guess from the blob hashes in the patches).
> 
> The breaking change here is that b4 no longer uses the series' base-commit by
> default -- it was always envisioned as more of a hint for the CI systems. As
> far as I'm aware, almost every real maintainer wants to apply to HEAD or, at
> least, to the most recent tag as the base.
> 
> One potential pitfall: b4 can't know if "the nearest ancestor annotated tag"
> is actually useful or meaningful, so if your own annotated pull request tags
> (e.g. net-7.3-rc7) are in the history of your branch, one of those could end
> up being the nearest tag. b4 always prints which tag it picked, so if you see
> that, just pass --merge-base with the release tag you wanted.

Hopefully it only looks for tags which haven't been deleted?

> The same logic now is in the "b4 review" TUI when taking a series with the
> merge method: the dialog shows which base it's going to use and lets you
> change it before anything is applied. I know Mark has been asking for this
> (cc'ing him for review).
> 
> Please let me know if this works for your workflow, or if you run into
> problems, or if I completely misunderstood the request. :)

Looks like you got it right. Thanks a lot!