diff --git a/src/building/bootstrapping.md b/src/building/bootstrapping.md
index fe34cb500..6dcb2b614 100644
--- a/src/building/bootstrapping.md
+++ b/src/building/bootstrapping.md
@@ -365,6 +365,19 @@ recompiling all dependencies.
 `CARGOFLAGS` will pass arguments to cargo itself (e.g. `--timings`). `CARGOFLAGS_BOOTSTRAP` and
 `CARGOFLAGS_NOT_BOOTSTRAP` work analogously to `RUSTFLAGS_BOOTSTRAP`.
 
+`RUSTC_EMIT` will cause `bootstrap` to pass `--emit` arguments on to `rustc`.
+You can specify which `--emit` formats are used with a comma separated list prefixed with
+a crate name and `=`, for example: `rustc_arena=llvm-ir,asm`.
+You can also substitute `*` for the crate name to apply it to all crates.
+You can combine multiple such specifiers by seperating them with semi-colons like
+`rustc_arena=llvm-ir,asm;rustc_span=asm;*=llvm-bc`.
+Currently, `rustc` supports `asm`, `llvm-bc`, `llvm-ir`,
+`obj`, `metadata`, `link`, `dep-info`, and `mir` as `--emit` formats.
+The emitted files will be stored inside the `emit`
+directory in the target-specific build directory.
+`RUSTC_EMIT` will not cause `bootstrap` to rebuild any crates, so you may need to modify
+one of the source files of the crates you're interested in.
+
 `--test-args` will pass arguments through to the test runner. For `tests/ui`, this is
 compiletest; for unit tests and doctests this is the `libtest` runner. Most test runner accept
 `--help`, which you can use to find out the options accepted by the runner.