On Fri, Apr 13, 2018 at 01:21:08PM -0700, Matthew Wilcox wrote: > On Fri, Apr 13, 2018 at 01:55:51PM -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote: > > > I believe that keeping the mm docs together will give better visibility of > > > what (little) mm documentation we have and will make the updates easier. > > > The documents that fit well into a certain topic could be linked there. For > > > instance: > > > > ...but this sounds like just the opposite...? > > > > I've had this conversation with folks in a number of subsystems. > > Everybody wants to keep their documentation together in one place - it's > > easier for the developers after all. But for the readers I think it's > > objectively worse. It perpetuates the mess that Documentation/ is, and > > forces readers to go digging through all kinds of inappropriate material > > in the hope of finding something that tells them what they need to know. > > > > So I would *really* like to split the documentation by audience, as has > > been done for a number of other kernel subsystems (and eventually all, I > > hope). > > > > I can go ahead and apply the RST conversion, that seems like a step in > > the right direction regardless. But I sure hope we don't really have to > > keep it as an unorganized jumble of stuff... > > I've started on Documentation/core-api/memory.rst which covers just > memory allocation. So far it has the Overview and GFP flags sections > written and an outline for 'The slab allocator', 'The page allocator', > 'The vmalloc allocator' and 'The page_frag allocator'. And typing this > up, I realise we need a 'The percpu allocator'. I'm thinking that this > is *not* the right document for the DMA memory allocators (although it > should link to that documentation). > > I suspect the existing Documentation/vm/ should probably stay as an > unorganised jumble of stuff. Developers mostly talking to other MM > developers. Stuff that people outside the MM fraternity should know > about needs to be centrally documented. By all means convert it to > ReST ... I don't much care, and it may make it easier to steal bits > or link to it from the organised documentation. The existing Documentation/vm contains different types of documents. Some are indeed "Developers mostly talking to other MM developers". Some are really user/administrator guides. Others are somewhat in between. I took another look at what's there and I think we can actually move part of Documentation/vm to Documentation/admin-guide. We can add Documentation/admin-guide/vm/ and title it "Memory Management Tuning" or something like that. And several files, e.g. hugetlbpage, ksm, soft-dirty can be moved there. -- Sincerely yours, Mike.
