Why does kernel-devel contain so many seemingly useless directories and files?
 

I have been a Windows kernel developer for many years. Now I start to develop Linux kernel modules.

To begin with, I install kernel-devel under /usr/src/kernels/`uname -r`. However, after checking the installation folder, I am confused because there seem a lot of seemingly useless folders and files inside the directory. Many folders are empty except for two files: Kconfig and Makefile.

Under Windows, to develop kernel device drivers, I just need an include folder containing all necessary header files, and an lib folder containing necessary libraries to link.

Under Linux, I can't understand why there are so many seemingly useless folders.

Any explanations?

Thanks in advance.

It does seem irritating. The one that got me going used to be xinitrc, which resided in
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit, if not in
/etc/X11/ or
/etc/X11/xinit
and it is far from the worst example, as I am sure others will point out. Red Hat seems to be the worst offender in spam directories.

To answer your question, the modular nature of linux kernel development has a lot to do with it, as does history, convention, and project organization. You can address them all down the tree with scripts, as in

for files in i do;

but of course you know that. You can search them with find and grep -r, so we have tools to deal with them. Right from the get go, unix had /home, /, /usr, and /usr/local each with it's own sub tree of includes, libs, etc.