I want to document my findings and my setup to follow the Linux kernel development.

The current developer flow rotates around two tools:

• b4 which you can install with your distro package manager or from PyPi.
• lei also packaged by major distros

b4

B4 is a tool created to make it easier to work with kernel patches from mailing lists. You can also use it to download lore discussion threads but I think that lei is a better tool for this task.

Retrieve and apply patch

The commands to use are b4 am or b4 shazam.

The difference between the two commands described in the docs can be summarized as:

• b4 am prepares the patch series so you can git am the resulting mbox file, but it doesn’t make any actual modifications to your current branch
• b4 shazam command prepares the patch series and applies it to the current branch.

lei

This tool is very useful to get a local copy of the kernel mailing lists you are interested in without subscribing and, most importantly, to get a local copy of the conversations in a given time interval (e.g. the last month) to browse them with mutt or another mail client while offline and/or without using the archives web interface.