linux kernel

Introduction

The Linux kernel uses Sphinx to generate pretty documentation from reStructuredText files under Documentation . To build the documentation in HTML or PDF formats, use make htmldocs or make pdfdocs . The generated documentation is placed in Documentation/output .

The reStructuredText files may contain directives to include structured documentation comments, or kernel-doc comments, from source files. Usually these are used to describe the functions and types and design of the code. The kernel-doc comments have some special structure and formatting, but beyond that they are also treated as reStructuredText.

Finally, there are thousands of plain text documentation files scattered around Documentation . Some of these will likely be converted to reStructuredText over time, but the bulk of them will remain in plain text.

Sphinx-doc extensions for sophisticated C developer