Having the ability to lookup how a kernel function works is very handy when writing your own device driver or any kernel module. Unfortunately you cannot just apt-get install kernel-manpages. Well wouldn’t that be nice! To get your kernel manual pages for a specific kernel you can download the kernel source and execute a few choice commands. Here is a short tutorial under Debian (and would probably work for most Linux distributions).
- Download your kernel version, in this case I grabbed version 2.6.32.3
- Untar the the document by: tar -xvf linux-2.6.32.3.tar.bz2
- Now move into the new linux-2.6.32.3 directory and type make mandocs. The system might prompt you to download missing packages to build the manuals, proceed to do so.
- After the documents have been made type make installmandocs, this will install the manual pages into /usr/local/man/man9/. This way you can now type man copy_to_user to see how to use the specified kernel function!
Read more: Prescott Linux