Kernel documentation: update and future directions
summary
Documentation build time drops once a recent Sphinx update is used; PDF output still takes ~30 minutes and drags in thousands of LaTeX packages because the RST→PDF tool crashes on the large corpus. Kernel has ~50–60k kernel-doc comments and ~2,000 contributors but no one paid full time for docs, so much content is outdated or missing. Proposals include a central Python modules directory, moving device docs under a devices subdir, adding doc build checks to CI, and using LLMs for review not blind generation.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction
- 5:57Documentation build improvements
- 8:43Documentation maintenance challenges
- 16:13Reader-focused documentation structure
- 18:58Python modules in kernel docs
- 20:06LLM use in documentation
- 27:12Scraper problem with AI engines
- 28:37Kernel docs organization progress
- 30:47Future of documentation translations
- 34:19Kernel doc language limitations
- 36:04Kernel doc build consistency checks
- 38:13Kernel doc templating proposal
- 39:20Search engine optimization for docs
- 40:24Q&A and closing remarks
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