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.
General guides to kernel administration¶
This initial section contains overall information, including the README file describing the kernel as a whole, documentation on kernel parameters, etc.
A big part of the kernel’s administrative interface is the /proc and sysfs virtual filesystems; these documents describe how to interact with tem
Security-related documentation:
Booting the kernel¶
Tracking down and identifying problems¶
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
- How to verify bugs and bisect regressions
- Bug hunting
- Bisecting a regression
- 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
- Clearing WARN_ONCE
- Reducing OS jitter due to per-cpu kthreads
- Softlockup detector and hardlockup detector (aka nmi_watchdog)
- Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS)
- Error decoding
- Address translation
- Linux Magic System Request Key Hacks
Core-kernel subsystems¶
These documents describe core-kernel administration interfaces that are likely to be of interest on almost any system.
Support for non-native binary formats. Note that some of these documents are ... old ...
Block-layer and filesystem administration¶
Device-specific guides¶
How to configure your hardware within your Linux system.
- ACPI Support
- ATA over Ethernet (AoE)
- Auxiliary Display Support
- Linux Braille Console
- btmrvl driver
- Dell Remote BIOS Update driver (dell_rbu)
- EDID
- GPIO
- Hardware random number generators
- Laptop Drivers
- Parallel port LCD/Keypad Panel support
- Media subsystem admin and user guide
- Linux NVMe multipath
- Parport
- Linux Plug and Play Documentation
- RapidIO Subsystem Guide
- Real Time Clock (RTC) Drivers for Linux
- Linux Serial Console
- Video Mode Selection Support 2.13
- Thermal Subsystem
- USB4 and Thunderbolt
- Software cursor for VGA
- Video Output Switcher Control
Workload analysis¶
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.
Everything else¶
A few hard-to-categorize and generally obsolete documents.