- The Linux Kernel documentation¶
- User-oriented documentation¶
- Application-developer documentation¶
- Introduction to kernel development¶
- Kernel API documentation¶
- Architecture-specific documentation¶
- The Linux Kernel documentation¶
- Working with the development community¶
- Internal API manuals¶
- Development tools and processes¶
- User-oriented documentation¶
- Firmware-related documentation¶
- Architecture-specific documentation¶
- Other documentation¶
- The Linux kernel user’s and administrator’s guide¶
The Linux Kernel documentation¶
This is the top level of the kernel’s documentation tree. Kernel documentation, like the kernel itself, is very much a work in progress; that is especially true as we work to integrate our many scattered documents into a coherent whole. Please note that improvements to the documentation are welcome; join the linux-doc list at vger.kernel.org if you want to help out.
User-oriented documentation¶
The following manuals are written for users of the kernel — those who are trying to get it to work optimally on a given system.
- The Linux kernel user’s and administrator’s guide
- Linux kernel release 4.x
- The kernel’s command-line parameters
- Linux allocated devices (4.x+ version)
- Reporting bugs
- Security bugs
- Bug hunting
- Bisecting a bug
- Tainted kernels
- Ramoops oops/panic logger
- Dynamic debug
- Explaining the dreaded “No init found.” boot hang message
- Rules on how to access information in sysfs
- Using the initial RAM disk (initrd)
- Linux Serial Console
- Linux Braille Console
- Parport
- RAID arrays
- Kernel module signing facility
- Linux Magic System Request Key Hacks
- Unicode support
- Software cursor for VGA
- Kernel Support for miscellaneous (your favourite) Binary Formats v1.1
- Mono(tm) Binary Kernel Support for Linux
- Java(tm) Binary Kernel Support for Linux v1.03
- Reliability, Availability and Serviceability
- Power Management
- Thunderbolt
- Linux Security Module Usage
Application-developer documentation¶
The user-space API manual gathers together documents describing aspects of the kernel interface as seen by application developers.
Introduction to kernel development¶
These manuals contain overall information about how to develop the kernel. The kernel community is quite large, with thousands of developers contributing over the course of a year. As with any large community, knowing how things are done will make the process of getting your changes merged much easier.
- Working with the kernel development community
- HOWTO do Linux kernel development
- Code of Conflict
- A guide to the Kernel Development Process
- Submitting patches: the essential guide to getting your code into the kernel
- Linux kernel coding style
- Email clients info for Linux
- Linux Kernel Enforcement Statement
- Minimal requirements to compile the Kernel
- Submitting Drivers For The Linux Kernel
- The Linux Kernel Driver Interface
- Linux kernel management style
- Everything you ever wanted to know about Linux -stable releases
- Linux Kernel patch submission checklist
- Index of Documentation for People Interested in Writing and/or Understanding the Linux Kernel
- Applying Patches To The Linux Kernel
- Adding a New System Call
- Linux magic numbers
- Why the “volatile” type class should not be used
- Coccinelle
- Sparse
- kcov: code coverage for fuzzing
- Using gcov with the Linux kernel
- The Kernel Address Sanitizer (KASAN)
- The Undefined Behavior Sanitizer — UBSAN
- Kernel Memory Leak Detector
- Getting started with kmemcheck
- Debugging kernel and modules via gdb
- Using kgdb, kdb and the kernel debugger internals
- Linux Kernel Selftests
- Introduction
- Sphinx Install
- Sphinx Build
- Writing Documentation
- Figures & Images
- Including kernel-doc comments
- Writing kernel-doc comments
- Including uAPI header files
- Unreliable Guide To Hacking The Linux Kernel
- Unreliable Guide To Locking
Kernel API documentation¶
These books get into the details of how specific kernel subsystems work from the point of view of a kernel developer. Much of the information here is taken directly from the kernel source, with supplemental material added as needed (or at least as we managed to add it — probably not all that is needed).
- The Linux driver implementer’s API guide
- Driver Basics
- Device drivers infrastructure
- Device Power Management
- Bus-Independent Device Accesses
- Buffer Sharing and Synchronization
- Device links
- Message-based devices
- Sound Devices
- Frame Buffer Library
- Voltage and current regulator API
- Industrial I/O
- Input Subsystem
- Linux USB API
- PCI Support Library
- PCI Hotplug Support Library
- Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI)
- I 2 C and SMBus Subsystem
- High Speed Synchronous Serial Interface (HSI)
- Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) Devices
- SCSI Interfaces Guide
- libATA Developer’s Guide
- MTD NAND Driver Programming Interface
- Parallel Port Devices
- 16×50 UART Driver
- Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM)
- W1: Dallas’ 1-wire bus
- RapidIO Subsystem Guide
- Writing s390 channel device drivers
- VME Device Drivers
- Linux 802.11 Driver Developer’s Guide
- The Userspace I/O HOWTO
- Linux Firmware API
- PINCTRL (PIN CONTROL) subsystem
- General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO)
- Miscellaneous Devices
- Core utilities
- Interfaces for kernel debugging
- Linux Media Infrastructure userspace API
- Media subsystem kernel internal API
- Linux Digital TV driver-specific documentation
- Video4Linux (V4L) driver-specific documentation
- CEC driver-specific documentation
- batman-adv
- Linux Networking and Network Devices APIs
- Z8530 Programming Guide
- Linux Input Subsystem userspace API
- Linux Input Subsystem kernel API
- Driver-specific documentation
- Introduction
- DRM Internals
- DRM Memory Management
- Kernel Mode Setting (KMS)
- Mode Setting Helper Functions
- Userland interfaces
- drm/i915 Intel GFX Driver
- drm/meson AmLogic Meson Video Processing Unit
- drm/pl111 ARM PrimeCell PL111 CLCD Driver
- drm/tegra NVIDIA Tegra GPU and display driver
- drm/tinydrm Driver library
- drm/vc4 Broadcom VC4 Graphics Driver
- VGA Switcheroo
- VGA Arbiter
- drm/bridge/dw-hdmi Synopsys DesignWare HDMI Controller
- TODO list
- Credentials in Linux
- IMA Template Management Mechanism
- Kernel Keys
- Linux Security Module Development
- Kernel Self-Protection
- Trusted Platform Module documentation
- ALSA Kernel API Documentation
- Designs and Implementations
- ALSA SoC Layer
- Advanced Linux Sound Architecture — Driver Configuration guide
- HD-Audio
- Card-Specific Information
- Kernel Crypto API Interface Specification
- Kernel Crypto API Architecture
- Developing Cipher Algorithms
- User Space Interface
- Programming Interface
- Code Examples
- The Linux VFS
- The proc filesystem
- Events based on file descriptors
- The Filesystem for Exporting Kernel Objects
- The debugfs filesystem
- The Linux Journalling API
- splice API
- pipes API
Architecture-specific documentation¶
These books provide programming details about architecture-specific implementation.
The Linux Kernel documentation¶
This is the top level of the kernel’s documentation tree. Kernel documentation, like the kernel itself, is very much a work in progress; that is especially true as we work to integrate our many scattered documents into a coherent whole. Please note that improvements to the documentation are welcome; join the linux-doc list at vger.kernel.org if you want to help out.
Working with the development community¶
The essential guides for interacting with the kernel’s development community and getting your work upstream.
Internal API manuals¶
Manuals for use by developers working to interface with the rest of the kernel.
Development tools and processes¶
Various other manuals with useful information for all kernel developers.
User-oriented documentation¶
The following manuals are written for users of the kernel — those who are trying to get it to work optimally on a given system and application developers seeking information on the kernel’s user-space APIs.
See also: the Linux man pages, which are kept separately from the kernel’s own documentation.
Firmware-related documentation¶
The following holds information on the kernel’s expectations regarding the platform firmwares.
Architecture-specific documentation¶
- CPU Architectures
- ARC architecture
- ARM Architecture
- ARM64 Architecture
- IA-64 Architecture
- LoongArch Architecture
- m68k Architecture
- MIPS-specific Documentation
- Nios II Specific Documentation
- OpenRISC Architecture
- PA-RISC Architecture
- powerpc
- RISC-V architecture
- s390 Architecture
- SuperH Interfaces Guide
- Sparc Architecture
- x86-specific Documentation
- Xtensa Architecture
Other documentation¶
There are several unsorted documents that don’t seem to fit on other parts of the documentation body, or may require some adjustments and/or conversion to ReStructured Text format, or are simply too old.
The Linux kernel user’s and administrator’s guide¶
The following is a collection of user-oriented documents that have been added to the kernel over time. There is, as yet, little overall order or organization here — this material was not written to be a single, coherent document! With luck things will improve quickly over time.
This initial section contains overall information, including the README file describing the kernel as a whole, documentation on kernel parameters, etc.
- Linux kernel release 6.x
- The kernel’s command-line parameters
- Linux allocated devices (4.x+ version)
- Documentation for /proc/sys
- Linux ABI description
- Feature status on all architectures
This section describes CPU vulnerabilities and their mitigations.
Here is a set of documents aimed at users who are trying to track down problems and bugs in particular.
- Reporting issues
- Reporting regressions
- How to quickly build a trimmed Linux kernel
- Bug hunting
- Bisecting a bug
- Tainted kernels
- Ramoops oops/panic logger
- Dynamic debug
- Explaining the «No working init found.» boot hang message
- Documentation for Kdump — The kexec-based Crash Dumping Solution
- Performance monitor support
- pstore block oops/panic logger
This is the beginning of a section with information of interest to application developers. Documents covering various aspects of the kernel ABI will be found here.
This is the beginning of a section with information of interest to application developers and system integrators doing analysis of the Linux kernel for safety critical applications. Documents supporting analysis of kernel interactions with applications, and key kernel subsystems expectations will be found here.
The rest of this manual consists of various unordered guides on how to configure specific aspects of kernel behavior to your liking.
- ACPI Support
- ATA over Ethernet (AoE)
- Auxiliary Display Support
- A block layer cache (bcache)
- The Android binderfs Filesystem
- Kernel Support for miscellaneous Binary Formats (binfmt_misc)
- Block Devices
- Boot Configuration
- Linux Braille Console
- btmrvl driver
- Control Groups version 1
- Control Group v2
- CIFS
- Clearing WARN_ONCE
- CPU load
- How CPU topology info is exported via sysfs
- Dell Remote BIOS Update driver (dell_rbu)
- Device Mapper
- EDID
- The EFI Boot Stub
- ext4 General Information
- File system Monitoring with fanotify
- NFS
- gpio
- Notes on the change from 16-bit UIDs to 32-bit UIDs
- Hardware random number generators
- Using the initial RAM disk (initrd)
- I/O statistics fields
- Java(tm) Binary Kernel Support for Linux v1.03
- IBM’s Journaled File System (JFS) for Linux
- Reducing OS jitter due to per-cpu kthreads
- Laptop Drivers
- Parallel port LCD/Keypad Panel support
- LDM — Logical Disk Manager (Dynamic Disks)
- Softlockup detector and hardlockup detector (aka nmi_watchdog)
- Linux Security Module Usage
- RAID arrays
- Media subsystem admin and user guide
- Memory Management
- Kernel module signing facility
- Mono(tm) Binary Kernel Support for Linux
- Namespaces
- Numa policy hit/miss statistics
- Parport
- Perf events and tool security
- Power Management
- Linux Plug and Play Documentation
- RapidIO Subsystem Guide
- Reliability, Availability and Serviceability
- Real Time Clock (RTC) Drivers for Linux
- Linux Serial Console
- Video Mode Selection Support 2.13
- Syscall User Dispatch
- Linux Magic System Request Key Hacks
- Thermal Subsystem
- USB4 and Thunderbolt
- Using UFS
- Unicode support
- Software cursor for VGA
- Video Output Switcher Control
- The SGI XFS Filesystem