Formatted kernel documentation at kernel.org [LWN.net]

For the last couple of release cycles, the kernel's ongoing transition to the Sphinx documentation system has left kernel.org behind. Thanks to some work by Konstantin Ryabitsev, that situation has now been remedied, and kernel.org has the formatted documentation generated from the current -rc kernel. The DocBook-generated documents remain available for as long as DocBook stays in use. (For those interested in the linux-next version of the documentation, the version on LWN's server is usually up to date; it currently has the changes that are queued for 4.10.)

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Formatted kernel documentation at kernel.org

Posted Oct 29, 2016 10:33 UTC (Sat) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link] (2 responses)

What a difference! I'm not a kernel developer, but still this delights me. Just to use Sphinx and a good theme like Read The Docs makes me instantly want to explore the kernel documentation, even if I really don't have any special reason to do so.

Thanks for the effort! Hope all kernel hackers enjoys the change as much as I do.

Formatted kernel documentation at kernel.org

Posted Oct 30, 2016 1:04 UTC (Sun) by cwillu (guest, #67268) [Link] (1 responses)

A bit more proof-reading would have been beneficial; there's a bunch of markdown'ish syntax things that got mangled, for instance:

The kernel parses parameters from the kernel command line up to “–”; if it doesn’t recognize a parameter and it doesn’t contain a ‘.’, the parameter gets passed to init: parameters with ‘=’ go into init’s environment, others are passed as command line arguments to init. Everything after “–” is passed as an argument to init.

where the "–"'s are supposed to be "--"'s.

Formatted kernel documentation at kernel.org

Posted Nov 4, 2016 11:06 UTC (Fri) by jani (subscriber, #74547) [Link]

I'm sure there are many, many more issues. We've had a plethora of documentation converted from DocBook and plain text to reStructuredText. We simply haven't had enough eyeballs to catch everything. But part of why this is so exciting is that the documentation is now more discoverable and accessible than before, especially for people who are not kernel developers. There's actually some positive buzz around the documentation (weird, huh?). So we'll attract more people to read the documentation and, like yourself, spot issues.

People are also asking how to help. I wrote down some notes at http://lkml.kernel.org/r/87r36ujh92.fsf@intel.com. You could add "please report issues in the documentation on linux-doc@vger.kernel.org" to the list.

Formatted kernel documentation at kernel.org

Posted Oct 30, 2016 13:24 UTC (Sun) by valberg (guest, #83862) [Link]

This is really great work, thanks a lot to all contributors!

Devhelp

Posted Oct 30, 2016 14:50 UTC (Sun) by swilmet (guest, #98424) [Link]

Great!

Maybe the kernel doc could be integrated with an API browser like Devhelp:
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Devhelp

When programming with GTK+ and GNOME libraries, I always use Devhelp, to access all the docs locally and in a convenient way (a keyboard shortcut in the text editor opens the doc for that symbol in Devhelp).

Devhelp supports other doc formats, as long as a suitable index file is generated.