I remember finding a good number of system-call manpages discussions in LKML. Otherwise, where should we find documentation for things like futexes, netlink sockets, and the rest?
For good or bad, these manpages are the 'most primary' sources available for such topics, only beside the code.
But unfortunately these man-pages do not always exist. I once had to carefully study the bluez userspace code to know how to best interface with the kernel Bluetooth API (undocumented AF_BLUETOOTH sockets, undocumented netlink interfaces, etc).
Posted Nov 15, 2010 10:38 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
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Yes, they are the most useful documentation we have, especially for things that do not have glibc wrappers. But even for the kernel they are descriptive, and for things for which the glibc wrappers are the primary implementation (like readdir()) or for which there is no kernel component, the manpages are completely after-the-fact. (As far as I can tell the glibc project no longer bothers to document anything at all. There are lots of utterly undocumented things in glibc's allegedly public interface.)