This is the top level of the kernel's documentation tree. Kernel documentation, like the kernel itself, is very much a work in progress; that is especially true as we work to integrate our many scattered documents into a coherent whole. Please note that improvements to the documentation are welcome; join the linux-doc list at vger.kernel.org if you want to help out.
The following describes the license of the Linux kernel source code (GPLv2), how to properly mark the license of individual files in the source tree, as well as links to the full license text.
The following manuals are written for users of the kernel — those who are trying to get it to work optimally on a given system.
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2 admin-guide/index kbuild/index
The following holds information on the kernel's expectations regarding the platform firmwares.
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2 firmware-guide/index devicetree/index
The user-space API manual gathers together documents describing aspects of the kernel interface as seen by application developers.
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2 userspace-api/index
These manuals contain overall information about how to develop the kernel. The kernel community is quite large, with thousands of developers contributing over the course of a year. As with any large community, knowing how things are done will make the process of getting your changes merged much easier.
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2 process/index dev-tools/index doc-guide/index kernel-hacking/index trace/index maintainer/index fault-injection/index livepatch/index
These books get into the details of how specific kernel subsystems work from the point of view of a kernel developer. Much of the information here is taken directly from the kernel source, with supplemental material added as needed (or at least as we managed to add it — probably not all that is needed).
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2 driver-api/index core-api/index locking/index accounting/index block/index cdrom/index cpu-freq/index ide/index fb/index fpga/index hid/index i2c/index iio/index isdn/index infiniband/index leds/index netlabel/index networking/index pcmcia/index power/index target/index timers/index spi/index w1/index watchdog/index virt/index input/index hwmon/index gpu/index security/index sound/index crypto/index filesystems/index vm/index bpf/index usb/index PCI/index scsi/index misc-devices/index scheduler/index mhi/index
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2 asm-annotations
These books provide programming details about architecture-specific implementation.
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2 arm/index arm64/index ia64/index m68k/index mips/index nios2/index openrisc/index parisc/index powerpc/index riscv/index s390/index sh/index sparc/index x86/index xtensa/index
The documentation in this section are provided by specific filesystem subprojects.
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2 filesystems/ext4/index
There are several unsorted documents that don't seem to fit on other parts of the documentation body, or may require some adjustments and/or conversion to ReStructured Text format, or are simply too old.
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2 staging/index watch_queue
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2 translations/index