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.

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.

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.