3e544d72df
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is the old reporting-bugs document, as it makes its essence hard to grasp; it's and also inaccurate and slightly outdated in a few spots.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of review from core developers there is only one major issue left: the section 'Decode failure message' is known to be outdated: it's waiting for someone familiar with the topic to write something up or give at least provide some hints and pointers what to write there.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> |
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| LICENSES | ||
| arch | ||
| block | ||
| certs | ||
| crypto | ||
| drivers | ||
| fs | ||
| include | ||
| init | ||
| ipc | ||
| kernel | ||
| lib | ||
| mm | ||
| net | ||
| samples | ||
| scripts | ||
| security | ||
| sound | ||
| tools | ||
| usr | ||
| virt | ||
| .clang-format | ||
| .cocciconfig | ||
| .get_maintainer.ignore | ||
| .gitattributes | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| .mailmap | ||
| COPYING | ||
| CREDITS | ||
| Kbuild | ||
| Kconfig | ||
| MAINTAINERS | ||
| Makefile | ||
| README | ||
README
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.