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>
2023-03-23 12:05:44 -06:00

145 lines
2.7 KiB
ReStructuredText

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.
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
kernel-parameters
devices
sysctl/index
abi
features
This section describes CPU vulnerabilities and their mitigations.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
hw-vuln/index
Here is a set of documents aimed at users who are trying to track down
problems and bugs in particular.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
reporting-issues
reporting-regressions
security-bugs
quickly-build-trimmed-linux
bug-hunting
bug-bisect
tainted-kernels
ramoops
dynamic-debug-howto
init
kdump/index
perf/index
pstore-blk
This is the beginning of a section with information of interest to
application developers. Documents covering various aspects of the kernel
ABI will be found here.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
sysfs-rules
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
The rest of this manual consists of various unordered guides on how to
configure specific aspects of kernel behavior to your liking.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
acpi/index
aoe/index
auxdisplay/index
bcache
binderfs
binfmt-misc
blockdev/index
bootconfig
braille-console
btmrvl
cgroup-v1/index
cgroup-v2
cifs/index
clearing-warn-once
cpu-load
cputopology
dell_rbu
device-mapper/index
edid
efi-stub
ext4
filesystem-monitoring
nfs/index
gpio/index
highuid
hw_random
initrd
iostats
java
jfs
kernel-per-CPU-kthreads
laptops/index
lcd-panel-cgram
ldm
lockup-watchdogs
LSM/index
md
media/index
mm/index
module-signing
mono
namespaces/index
numastat
parport
perf-security
pm/index
pnp
rapidio
ras
rtc
serial-console
svga
syscall-user-dispatch
sysrq
thermal/index
thunderbolt
ufs
unicode
vga-softcursor
video-output
xfs
.. only:: subproject and html
Indices
=======
* :ref:`genindex`