Jan 4, 2026 · This site is operated by the Linux Kernel Organization, a 501 (c)3 nonprofit corporation, with support from the following sponsors.

Dec 3, 2025 · Unless you downloaded, compiled and installed your own version of kernel from kernel.org, you are running a distribution kernel. To find out the version of your kernel, run uname -r:

The following manuals are written for users of the kernel — those who are trying to get it to work optimally on a given system and application developers seeking information on the kernel’s user …

Aug 6, 2024 · Kernel.org accounts are usually reserved for subsystem maintainers or high-profile developers. It is absolutely not necessary to have an account on kernel.org to contribute to the …

The maintainers of the various kernel subsystems — and also many kernel subsystem developers — expose their current state of development in source repositories.

There are a great many reasons why kernel code should be merged into the official (“mainline”) kernel, including automatic availability to users, community support in many forms, and the ability to …

printk() is one of the most widely known functions in the Linux kernel. It’s the standard tool we have for printing messages and usually the most basic way of tracing and debugging.

In addition to the kernel command line, the boot config can be used for passing the kernel parameters. All the key-value pairs under kernel key will be passed to kernel cmdline directly.

These manuals contain overall information about how to develop the kernel. The kernel community is quite large, with thousands of developers contributing over the course of a year.

While the typical use case for sync_state() is to have the kernel cleanly take over management of devices from the bootloader, the usage of sync_state() is not restricted to that.