Assorted newb questions

Greg KH greg at kroah.com
Tue Aug 12 15:56:14 EDT 2014


On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 02:13:13PM -0500, Jaret Flores wrote:
> 1)  It seems like most of the material (outside of the kernel itself)
> corresponds to version 2.6.  Why is this?  Has nothing "significant"
> changed with the core structure of the kernel since then?  Or is it
> just that no one has decided to write a book about a newer version?

Lots of things change with each kernel version, but keeping a book
up-to-date with them all is very difficult in the publishing industry of
today.  Get the basic concepts from a book, and then look at the code
for the exact details of what is going on.  As you have access to all of
the code, this isn't that much of a problem as it sounds.

> 2) In some header files I see comments that look like:
> 
> /**
>   * struct some_struct - description
>   * @property1: description
>   * ...
>   * @propertyn: description
>   */
> 
> This style looks very similar to http://usejsdoc.org/ which is used to
> build html documentation from code comments.  Does the kernel use a
> tool like this?  i.e. is there html documentation generated from the
> code comments?

Yes, this format is called 'kerneldoc' and you can use it to create a
ton of documentation from the kernel source tree.  Look at the help
instructions for make:
	make help
in the "Documentation targets:" section for more details on how to
create this documentation from the source tree.

greg k-h



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