I would of thought the Linus tree would be what you want to develop on. Once it's hit rcN
status API changes should be minimal and stability approaching release quality.
Fundamentally if it's going to get pulled into the Linux tree it will need to be based on it,
otherwise git will get confused as to the common ancestor.
However it seems sensible that you should test your feature branch against the linux-next du
jour and check it won't get broken on that merge. If it does then you need to track down the
sub-system that's changing and work with that tree, possibly re-basing on their for-linus
branch. linux-next is far too much of a churn fest to base work on it, and it shouldn't be
used that way.