Linux Kernel-Userland Interface Design, Testing, and Documentation: An Update
from LinuxConf EU, and the 2007 Linux Kernel Summit
By Michael
Kerrisk, Software Engineering TeamAs you may know,Google
allows its engineers to spend 20% of their time on projects independent of their regular day
to day job. For my 20% time, I chose to continue and expand my work on maintaining the Linux
man-pages.
Since
April,
we've managed to ship 21 new releases, with a dozen or so new pages, and around 400 major and
minor improvements to existing pages.
My work on the Linux Man-pages
project
man-pages led me to
talk about kernel-userland interface design,
testing, and documentation at the recent
LinuxConf Europe, where my Zurich colleague
Roman Marxer also spoke about Google's recently open-sourced
Ganeti virtual server management
software.
I was lucky enough to be invited to the immediately following
USENIX Linux Kernel Developers
Summit, where I joined Google colleagues Andrew Morton, Paul Menage, and Martin
Bligh to participate in the discussion of current topics related to kernel development,
including the topic of kernel-userland API design, testing, and documentation.
You can read my talk, and in-depth coverage of the Kernel Developer Summit at
LWN.net. It's available to LWN.net
subscribers only until the 20th of September, but you can already see the
obligatory group photo.
![](https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-developer-goog-blog-assets/images_archive/original_images/Img_0546_500.jpg)
Googlers Andrew Morton and Paul Menage relaxing at the end of the Linux Kernel Summit,
Cambridge, England
(photo credit: Michael Kerrisk)
Ed. note: Post updated to fix typo.