linux/Documentation/admin-guide/index.rst

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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.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
README
devices
features
A big part of the kernel's administrative interface is the /proc and sysfs
virtual filesystems; these documents describe how to interact with tem
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
sysfs-rules
sysctl/index
cputopology
abi
Security-related documentation:
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
hw-vuln/index
LSM/index
perf-security
Booting the kernel
------------------
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
bootconfig
kernel-parameters
efi-stub
initrd
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.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
docs: Add a new text describing how to report bugs Add a mostly finished document describing how to report issues with the Linux kernel to its developers. It is designed to be a lot more straight forward and easier to follow than the current text about this (Documentation/admin-guide/reporting-bugs.rst); at the same time the new text should be more helpful for people unfamiliar with the topic, as it provides a lot more details, too. The main work on the text is done, but some polishing is still needed. The text also needs to be reviewed by more people and a few issues still might need some discussion. To make these tasks easier, it was decided ([1]) to add this document to the kernel sources in parallel to the existing text; the latter will be removed once this text is considered good enough(tm). This document is quite long and provides a lot of details, but was carefully crafted to make sure it's can also serve people that are in a hurry. That's mainly achieved by having a TDLR and a step-by-step guide, which should be good enough for quite a lot of people. Everybody that wants or need more explanations can find them in a reference section, which describes all the needed steps in detail. Thanks to this structure the text can work for kernel developers that just need to look something up, experienced FLOSS contributors that are unfamiliar with the kernel's bug reporting workflow, and users reporting something upstream for the first time. The text is thus a bit like the kernel itself, which works well for embedded machines, a typical desktop PC, cloud servers, and HPC. The document was written in the hope it will improve the quality of the bug reports, especially those that come from people unfamiliar with how Linux kernel development works. Sadly quite a few reports from this group are currently of poor quality and/or get submitted to the wrong place. Part of the problem is the old reporting-bugs document, as it makes its essence hard to grasp; it's and also inaccurate and slightly outdated in a few spots. Due to this quite a few valid reports are ignored in the end, which is annoying for those that compiled them and bad for the kernel's quality. The document near the top points out that it's still unfinished, but nevertheless ready for consumption. Those few areas in the text that might need some further discussion contain a note pointing this out. Besides lack of review from core developers there is only one major issue left: the section 'Decode failure message' is known to be outdated: it's waiting for someone familiar with the topic to write something up or give at least provide some hints and pointers what to write there. The new document is dual-licensed under GPL-2.0+ or CC-BY-4.0. The latter is way more liberal and makes it attractive to use this text as a base when writing about this topic on websites or in books. This hopefully increases the chances that such texts are accurate and stick to official way of doing things. [1] https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20201118172958.5b014a44@lwn.net Signed-off-by: Thorsten Leemhuis <linux@leemhuis.info> CC: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> CC: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> CC: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/e2db808f954744b79f10937a923d9c99bdca1fca.1607063223.git.linux@leemhuis.info Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
2020-12-04 07:43:49 +01:00
reporting-issues
reporting-regressions
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>
2023-03-05 14:04:44 +01:00
quickly-build-trimmed-linux
docs: new text on bisecting which also covers bug validation Add a second document on bisecting regressions explaining the whole process from beginning to end -- while also describing how to validate if a problem is still present in mainline. This "two in one" approach is possible, as checking whenever a bug is in mainline is one of the first steps before performing a bisection anyway and thus needs to be described. Due to this approach the text also works quite nicely in conjunction with Documentation/admin-guide/reporting-issues.rst, as it covers all typical cases where users will need to build a kernel in exactly the same order. The text targets users that normally run kernels from their Linux distributor who might never have compiled their own kernel. This aim is why the first kernel built while following this guide is generated from the latest mainline codebase. This will rule out that the regression (a) was fixed already and (b) is caused by config change a vendor distributor performed; checking mainline will furthermore (c) determine if the issue is something that needs to be reported to the regular developers or the stable team (this is needed even when readers bisect within a stable series). Only then are readers instructed to build their own variant of the 'good' kernel to validate the trimmed .config file created during early in the guide, as performing a bisection with a broken one would be a waste of time. There is a small downside of this order: readers might have to go back to testing mainline, if it turns out there is a problem with their .config. But that should be rare -- and if the regression was already fixed readers might not get to this point anyway. Hence in the end this order should mean that readers built less kernels overall. This sequence allows the text to easily cover the "check if a bug is present in the upstream kernel" case while only making things a tiny bit more complicated. The text tries to prevent readers from running into many mistakes users are known to frequently make. The steps required for this might look superfluous for people that are already familiar with bisections -- but anyone with that knowledge should be able to adapt the instructions to their use-case or will not need this text at all. Style and structure of the text match the one Documentation/admin-guide/quickly-build-trimmed-linux.rst uses. Quite a few paragraphs are even copied from there and not changed at all or only slightly. This will complicate maintenance, as some future changes to one of these documents will have to be replicated in the other. But this is the lesser evil: solutions like "sending readers from one document over to the other" or "extracting the common parts into a separate document" might work in other cases, but would be too confusing here given the topic and the target audience. Signed-off-by: Thorsten Leemhuis <linux@leemhuis.info> [jc: Undo spurious removal of subsection header line] Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> Message-ID: <02b084a06de4ad61ac4ecd92b9265d4df4d03d71.1709282441.git.linux@leemhuis.info>
2024-03-01 09:41:06 +01:00
verify-bugs-and-bisect-regressions
bug-hunting
bug-bisect
tainted-kernels
ramoops
dynamic-debug-howto
init
kdump/index
perf/index
pstore-blk
clearing-warn-once
kernel-per-CPU-kthreads
lockup-watchdogs
RAS/index
sysrq
Core-kernel subsystems
----------------------
These documents describe core-kernel administration interfaces that are
likely to be of interest on almost any system.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
cgroup-v2
cgroup-v1/index
cpu-load
mm/index
module-signing
namespaces/index
numastat
pm/index
syscall-user-dispatch
Support for non-native binary formats. Note that some of these
documents are ... old ...
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
binfmt-misc
java
mono
Block-layer and filesystem administration
-----------------------------------------
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
bcache
binderfs
blockdev/index
cifs/index
device-mapper/index
ext4
filesystem-monitoring
nfs/index
iostats
jfs
md
ufs
xfs
Device-specific guides
----------------------
How to configure your hardware within your Linux system.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
acpi/index
aoe/index
auxdisplay/index
braille-console
btmrvl
dell_rbu
edid
gpio/index
hw_random
laptops/index
lcd-panel-cgram
media/index
nvme-multipath
parport
pnp
rapidio
rtc
serial-console
svga
thermal/index
thunderbolt
vga-softcursor
video-output
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.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
workload-tracing
Everything else
---------------
A few hard-to-categorize and generally obsolete documents.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
ldm
unicode
.. only:: subproject and html
Indices
=======
* :ref:`genindex`