Sources of documentation

• Text files in the kernel's Documentation directory.
• Output of kernel's "make htmldocs".
• html conversion of man-pages package
• Linux Weekly News kernel articles
• Linux Device Drivers book (third edition) (second edition)
• Ottawa Linux Symposium papers
• IBM Developerworks Linux Library
• Linux Kernel Mailing List FAQ
• Kernel Planet (blog aggregator)

Standards

• Single Unix Specification v3 (Also known as Open Group Base Specifications issue 6, and closely overlapping with Posix. See especially system interfaces)
• Linux Foundation's specs page (ELF, Dwarf, ABI...)

Translations

• Linux Kernel Translation Project
• Japanese
• Chinese

todo

• Index of terms used by the kernel

Topics

Building from source
   Configuring, building, Installing, running, debugging
     User interface
     infrastructure (kbuild, tmppiggy)
   Cross compiling, building out of tree, UML, QEMU

Source code layout
  Following the boot
  Major subsystems
  Architectures

Infrastructure
  Process Scheduler
    fork, exec, sleep
  Timers
    Interrupt handling
  memory management
    mmap, DMA
  vfs
    Filesystems
      Types of filesystems
        Block backed
        Ram backed
        Synthetic
          /proc /sys symfs usbfs devpts
        Network
          FUSE
      Filesystem drivers
  Drivers:
    Filesystem
    Block (block layer, scsi layer)
    Character (tty, audio, null, random/urandom, zero)
    DRI
  Hotplug
  Input core.
  Network
  Modules
    EXPORT_SYMBOL, EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL
  Busses
  API (how userspace talks to the kernel)
    Syscalls, ioctls
    executable file formats
      a.out, elf, #! flat misc
        css, bss, 
    Device nodes
    Pipes (new pipe infrastructure)
    Synthetic filesystems

Hardware:
  Architectures
    echo include/asm-* | sed 's@include/asm-@@g'
    generic, uml
    x86, x86-64 powerpc/ppc arm mips sparc sh 68k/coldfire
  DMA, IRQ, MMU (mmap), IOMMU, port I/O
  Busses.
    PCI, USB

A working Linux root filesystem.
  Bootloader, kernel
  finding root
    initramfs, switch_root vs pivot_root, /dev/console
  init program and PID 1
    What does daemonizing mean?
  C library, Dynamic loader
  FHS directories
    populating /dev from sysfs.

Submitting Patches

Following Linux development
  Distros do it for you.
  CATB
  http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html
  http://www.tux.org/lkml/
  lwn, kernel traffic, kernelplanet.
  http://www.kernel.org/faq
    http://www.kernel.org/kdist/rss.xml
  git/mercurial
  Documentation/{CodingStyle,SubmitChecklist}
  The four layer (developer, maintainer, subsystem, linus) model.

  Politics
    Stable API nonsense
    Why reiser4 not in.

Glossary

This page maintained by Rob Landley .