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Development tools for the kernel

This document is a collection of documents about development tools that can be used to work on the kernel. For now, the documents have been pulled together without any significant effort to integrate them into a coherent whole; patches welcome!

A brief overview of testing-specific tools can be found in Kernel Testing Guide

Tools that are specific to debugging can be found in Debugging advice for Linux Kernel developers

Table of contents

• Kernel Testing Guide
  • Writing and Running Tests
  • Code Coverage Tools
  • Dynamic Analysis Tools
  • Static Analysis Tools
• Checkpatch
  • Options
  • Message Levels
  • Type Descriptions
• clang-format
  • Review files and patches for coding style
  • Reformatting blocks of code
  • Missing support
  • Extra features/options
• Coccinelle
  • Getting Coccinelle
  • Supplemental documentation
  • Using Coccinelle on the Linux kernel
  • Coccinelle parallelization
  • Using Coccinelle with a single semantic patch
  • Controlling Which Files are Processed by Coccinelle
  • Debugging Coccinelle SmPL patches
  • .cocciconfig support
  • Additional flags
  • SmPL patch specific options
  • SmPL patch Coccinelle requirements
  • Proposing new semantic patches