No description
  • C 96.9%
  • Assembly 0.9%
  • Rust 0.6%
  • Shell 0.6%
  • Python 0.5%
  • Other 0.3%
Find a file
Thorsten Leemhuis efe920466f docs: describe how to quickly build a trimmed kernel
Add a text explaining how to quickly build a kernel, as that's something
users will often have to do when they want to report an issue or test
proposed fixes. This is a huge and frightening task for quite a few
users these days, as many rely on pre-compiled kernels and have never
built their own. They find help on quite a few websites explaining the
process in various ways, but those howtos often omit important details
or make things too hard for the 'quickly build just for testing' case
that 'localmodconfig' is really useful for. Hence give users something
at hand to guide them, as that makes it easier for them to help with
testing, debugging, and fixing the kernel.

To keep the complexity at bay, the document explicitly focuses on how to
compile the kernel on commodity distributions running on commodity
hardware. People that deal with less common distributions or hardware
will often know their way around already anyway.

The text describes a few oddities of Arch and Debian that were found by
the author and a few volunteers that tested the described procedure.
There are likely more such quirks that need to be covered as well as a
few things the author will have missed -- but one has to start
somewhere.

The document heavily uses anchors and links to them, which makes things
slightly harder to read in the source form. But the intended target
audience is way more likely to read rendered versions of this text on
pages like docs.kernel.org anyway -- and there those anchors and links
allow easy jumps to the reference section and back, which makes the
document a lot easier to work with for the intended target audience.

Aspects relevant for bisection were left out on purpose, as that is a
related, but in the end different use case. The rough plan is to have a
second document with a similar style to cover bisection. The idea is to
reuse a few bits from this document and link quite often to entries in
the reference section with the help of the anchors in this text.

Signed-off-by: Thorsten Leemhuis <linux@leemhuis.info>
Reviewed-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/1a788a8e7ba8a2063df08668f565efa832016032.1678021408.git.linux@leemhuis.info
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
History 2023-03-23 12:05:44 -06:00
arch cpumask: re-introduce constant-sized cpumask optimizations 2023-03-05 14:30:34 -08:00
block block-6.3-2023-03-03 2023-03-03 10:21:39 -08:00
certs Kbuild updates for v6.3 2023-02-26 11:53:25 -08:00
crypto Networking changes for 6.3. 2023-02-21 18:24:12 -08:00
Documentation docs: describe how to quickly build a trimmed kernel 2023-03-23 12:05:44 -06:00
drivers This push fixes a regression in the caam driver. 2023-03-05 11:32:30 -08:00
fs qnx4: credit contributors in CREDITS 2023-03-14 12:56:30 -06:00
include cpumask: re-introduce constant-sized cpumask optimizations 2023-03-05 14:30:34 -08:00
init Kbuild updates for v6.3 2023-02-26 11:53:25 -08:00
io_uring io_uring-6.3-2023-03-03 2023-03-03 10:25:29 -08:00
ipc Merge branch 'work.namespace' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs 2023-02-24 19:20:07 -08:00
kernel A set of updates for the interrupt susbsystem: 2023-03-05 11:19:16 -08:00
lib cpumask: re-introduce constant-sized cpumask optimizations 2023-03-05 14:30:34 -08:00
LICENSES LICENSES: Add the copyleft-next-0.3.1 license 2022-11-08 15:44:01 +01:00
mm mm: avoid gcc complaint about pointer casting 2023-03-04 14:03:27 -08:00
net nfsd-6.3 fixes: 2023-03-01 11:03:44 -08:00
rust Rust fixes for 6.3-rc1 2023-03-03 14:51:15 -08:00
samples LoongArch changes for v6.3 2023-03-01 09:27:00 -08:00
scripts Remove Intel compiler support 2023-03-05 10:49:37 -08:00
security capability: just use a 'u64' instead of a 'u32[2]' array 2023-03-01 10:01:22 -08:00
sound sound fixes for 6.3-rc1 2023-03-04 10:53:59 -08:00
tools Changes in this cycle were: 2023-03-02 09:45:34 -08:00
usr usr/gen_init_cpio.c: remove unnecessary -1 values from int file 2022-10-03 14:21:44 -07:00
virt KVM/riscv changes for 6.3 2023-02-15 12:33:28 -05:00
.clang-format cpumask: re-introduce constant-sized cpumask optimizations 2023-03-05 14:30:34 -08:00
.cocciconfig scripts: add Linux .cocciconfig for coccinelle 2016-07-22 12:13:39 +02:00
.get_maintainer.ignore get_maintainer: add Alan to .get_maintainer.ignore 2022-08-20 15:17:44 -07:00
.gitattributes .gitattributes: use 'dts' diff driver for *.dtso files 2023-02-26 15:28:23 +09:00
.gitignore .gitignore: ignore *.cover and *.mbx 2023-02-05 18:51:22 +09:00
.mailmap mailmap: map Dikshita Agarwal's old address to his current one 2023-03-02 21:54:24 -08:00
.rustfmt.toml rust: add .rustfmt.toml 2022-09-28 09:02:20 +02:00
COPYING COPYING: state that all contributions really are covered by this file 2020-02-10 13:32:20 -08:00
CREDITS qnx4: credit contributors in CREDITS 2023-03-14 12:56:30 -06:00
Kbuild Kbuild updates for v6.1 2022-10-10 12:00:45 -07:00
Kconfig kbuild: ensure full rebuild when the compiler is updated 2020-05-12 13:28:33 +09:00
MAINTAINERS docs: describe how to quickly build a trimmed kernel 2023-03-23 12:05:44 -06:00
Makefile Linux 6.3-rc1 2023-03-05 14:52:03 -08:00
README Drop all 00-INDEX files from Documentation/ 2018-09-09 15:08:58 -06:00

Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.  The formatted documentation can also be read online at:

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.