The purpose of these slides is to provide some notes to newcomers to kernel development. As approaching the Linux kernel development is difficult, we aim to simplify the procedure.
We use slidev for writing our slides. This
allows us to have a common template, to be able to export slides in a very fast
way and to review them as text, allowing us to use git to correct us without
doing it "the old way" (not as old as saving them on floppy disks USB
devices and passing them around).
- Node.js 20 or newer
- npm
- Playwright Chromium for PDF/PNG export (installed once, see below)
npm installThe main deck is kernel/linux-kernel/linux-kernel.md; the chapters live in
kernel/linux-kernel/slides/. The npm scripts already point to the main entry
file, so no path is needed on the command line.
npm run devThen open http://localhost:3030.
npm run buildThe generated site is written to dist/ and is what the Netlify/Vercel
configurations deploy.
PDF export is powered by Playwright. Install the browser once:
npx playwright install chromiumThen export the deck:
npm run exportThis creates linux-kernel-export.pdf in the repository root. To choose the
output path:
npm run export -- --output kernel/linux-kernel/linux-kernel.pdfExport only a range of slides, or use another format:
npm run export -- --range "1-10"
npm run export -- --format png --output /tmp/slides-pngUseful export options:
--output <path>— output file (PDF/PPTX) or directory (PNG)--range "1,4-6"— selected slides--format pdf|png|pptx— output format (default:pdf)--with-clicks— one page per click animation--dark— export with the dark theme--per-slide— render slide by slide (may break cross-slide links and the TOC)
Generated PDFs and the dist/ directory are build artifacts and are not
committed.