Generating the kernel documentation from source

You can literally generate the full Linux kernel documentation from within the kernel source tree in various popular formats (including PDF, HTML, LaTeX, EPUB, or XML), in a Javadoc or Doxygen-like style. The modern documentation system used internally by the kernel is called Sphinx. Using make help within the kernel source tree will reveal several documentation targets, among them htmldocs, pdfdocs, and more. So, you can, for example, cd to the kernel source tree and run make pdfdocs to build the complete Linux kernel documentation as PDF documents (the PDFs, as well as some other meta-docs, will be placed in Documentation/output/latex). The first time, at least, you will likely be prompted to install several packages and utilities (we don't show this explicitly).

Don't worry if the preceding details are not crystal clear yet. I suggest you first read Chapter 2, Building the 5.x Linux Kernel from Source – Part 1, and Chapter 3, Building the 5.x Linux Kernel from Source – Part 2, and then revisit these details.