Slashdot Mirror
Looking At The Linux Kernel
A reader writes: "Some folks from The Boston Consulting Group with OSDN have been working on creating a visual representation of the Linux Kernel. It's been put online, complete with instructions with how to read it, and how to make sense of the information." There's also some new code checked into the Free Code Graphing Project, which enabled this to project to come together (look at CVS)
- let's see if we can get people to do it with things like *BSD, Apache and some of the other great projects out there. This is a continuation with the other work being done, like the OSS demographic work.
(Note: Slashdot is part of
OSDN.)
Karim Lakhani, progenitor in many ways of the project also commented: "The kernelmap shows beautifully the inherent modularity of the Linux
Kernel. We think modularity of the source code is one of the important
strategic advantages that the Linux Community has and we wanted to move
beyond a magnifying glass on the kernel map poster to make it browsable
and to let the community add new features. We hope that this can become
a tool for navigating the kernel and learning more about how it works.
Rusty Russel and Martin Pool did an incredible job creating the map and
transforming it into html."
on a whiteboard. You know, the guys that love to draw rectangles and clouds and arrows and boxes sitting on top of other boxes and call it an "architecture."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
When will they release something like this for Microsoft? If a picture is worth a thousand words, then perhaps microsoft can release a movie detailing their kernel layout???
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
1) Have the key readable at all levels of zoom
/. effect worsens
2) Do it before the
Otherwise, all I'm looking at is some coloured boxes.
It's only slightly more complicated than the kernel itself.
There really is a penguin at the center of the kernel!
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
at zoom level 4 its' creaking...
You'd think OSDN would be able to code around the slashdot effect!
This would be useful if it can be mirrored a thousand fold.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Can I get that poster in .bmp format?
1. Obtain standard ball of string
2. Unravel ball of string
3. Place unravelled string in washing machine
4. Standard wash without soap
5. Tumble dry
Looks more like HAL
Does anybody have a mirror? Looks like the site just got slashdotted just before I could see it. Damn.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
For the last 10 years the "most expensive and complicated" option has been Microsoft, and that is what the consultants have pushed.
Why would BCG be involved in Linux???? There is no percentage in it for them - or is there? Help me understand here.
sPh
How does this help someone understand anything about the kernel?
Now that slashdot has slashdotted its parent OSDN, will slashdot slashdot it self as well
Looks like a mystic swirling mandala. I'm wondering if staring at it long enough with the right mindset makes you see the matrix...
Find Boba / bubble tea in your zipcode.
I mean, all this talk of kernels. Kernel this, kernel that. Makes me want to go get haloween candy.
;)
Mmmm... Candy...
AMCGLTD.COM. Where cats, science fictio
This could be made into a great SVG or Flash interactive.
Also, what about the third dimension? there is a lot of info. there - perhaps it would be more managable to look at in 3D?
Question: is it really useful? I'm not a kernal coder, but it seems to me that this could be a neat way of identifying bad coding e.g. identifying variable and function scope and keeping it neat and modular. Could this be a feature of future IDEs for Linux programmers?
(later they will recommend that you outsource everything to one of their "partners")
Which is exactly where the real money has always been, as SAP showed us so well. And it has been explained to exhaustion already that the right way to make money with Free software is by providing service to the users of the said software.
ThinkGeek has the Kernel map poster...
Congrats on the waste of money. Honestly, this is pretty and all, but hardly useful, and, most likely, not worth the money spent on the project.
What is the point of this? To sell it as posters and make a profit?
Who, in their right mind, would use this to change design, or track a bug?
This project is a waste of money that would be better off spent on the kernel itself, not a pretty picture of the kernel.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
How about a hardware compatibility list. I would expect something like that straight off of kernel.org. Why should I search through message boards to see if someone was able to get my ethernet card to work, or search through changelogs.
We always called those Markitecture diagrams. They love it. Trust me.
Seriously OSDN... waste time and resources on something trivial like this (which has already been done several times), but meanwhile, kill davecentral.com.
Way to go guys, yeah
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I hate to be negative but this is not really useful. As Geek Art it's kinda cool -- but let's not kid ourselves about it having any value for kernel hackers. It's just some pretty pictures that Linux scene whores can look at and say "Oooh ahhh I grok the kernel now" -- but don't expect any of those people to submit patches or new device drivers anytime soon.
You know, the Linux kernel is not massive -- you can spend a couple hours looking at source code and get a much better idea than you would with these kinds of visualizations. And if you can't read source code like that, then you shouldn't really be wasting your time looking at pictures.
Could it be because BCG is attempting to appeal to potential open-source clients?
If you take a look at the map it looks pretty neat, but like most things that are visual appealling, they tend to lack functionality. The only reason to do this map was neato factor and to get their name in the press. I think it will work because management tends to be impressed by style more often than substance.
I finally found something more overwhelming than HTML 4.01 (transitional) validation of Microsoft's website.
I think we just slashdotted the linux kernel...
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
Moreover, there is free and open-source implementations of those two visualizations: Treemap Java Library and Hypertree Java Library.
oh, I dunno bout that. Have you ever seen a penguin swimming? In the right place, its fast, sleek, and very efficient!
"Get Moose and Squirrel!"
Probably because your best leads are the clients you've already served.
If you've got 99% of your clients using Windows whatever, consulting them to go another way is always going to make you some more money. While Free software may be cheaper than a six pack of Schlitz, installing and developing a system is not. As long as you listen to their recommendations and you their "partners", they're going to make money.
And, ahem, *cough*cough* how does this make BCG so special in the consulting market?
The volume of customers requesting services is down, they needed a new market.
They're clearly trying to determine whether Open Source could be a more complicated and expensive option. They have to decide whether to start suggesting that companies hire open source hackers to write whatever the companies want. If you look at the demographic survey, they are clearly figuring out that open source hackers are frequently not employed, but could demand a lot of money if someone were going to hire them, and they have the experience to write really complex stuff.
A little less tongue-in-cheek: BCG could probably do well coming in, looking at what your problems are, and telling you which open source hackers you should pay to fix them. Then they can charge a percentage on the whole thing.
There's only a limited amount of money you can spend buying MicroSoft products. It's huge, but you can spend even more on open source if you pay the salaries of the hackers. I mean, they are projects with hundreds or even thousands of contributors. If you give them each $100k...
What's up with M$ adverts on /.
??
6. ???
7. Profit!
This space left intentionally blank.
BCG does little IT consulting - most of the work is strictly business strategy or ops work - should I open this plant, how should I price products, should I buy that company, etc...
They are one of the only firms that doesn't do IT work directly, don't do "general contracting" except in very very rare circumstances, and don't have the "IT partners" that you reference.
My guess is that they are more interested in the organizational model that allows open source development to work at all rather than in the kernel structure per se.
Also, a beautiful, visually appealing picture of the kernel can help non-techies understand that the kernel is a well-thought out piece of software engineering and not just some half-ass code pumped out by computer hippies and geeks with nothing better to do. Again, this can help further the cause of Linux with those in power who make purchasing decisions but have little technical expertise.
This is good work.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
thinkgeek sells a poster of the 2.4 kernal setup just like this:8 4.shtml
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/funstuff/38
and you can zoom in. i think i actually saw an ad for it on slashdot.. wtf??
Hey stop that, If you don't you'll get a sonic boom in the face!
Actually, I think that's how it worked.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Hmmm, I generated and printed out this map almost 2 years ago, using the 2.4.0 kernel. This isn't new, folks. Perhaps the only thing of interest is the webification of it.
Seriously, Rusty released the source for generating all the postscript shortly after 2.4.0 - the fact that its resurfacing with a company name behind it seems like its merely a way to promote the consulting business.
um, no.
Awesome. I am really impressed with the image. Now I want to see a visual representation of M$Windows.
Second thought, I see enough toddler artwork from my two-year-old.
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
First a disclaimer: I've worked for the past three years at BCG. BCG's core business is not IT consulting (as IBM, for example) but business strategy. That means that our recommendations are usually not centered around any particular technology infrastructure, nor do we usually work with the IT department of our clients. Instead our recommendations focus on ways to increase the competitive advantage of our clients, some of the time that competitive advantage is reached through harnessing a new business model or a new way to organize around the work that needs to be done. Open Source is an active area of interest inside BCG mainly because it represents an innovative way to organize people to meet a goal. There has been an active mailing list discussing Open Source topics and how they apply to our clients needs for quite some time, also this is not the first collaboration of BCG with the movement, the results of a survey amongst sourceforge members conducted by BCG can be found here .
This is an answer to all the comments saying how pointless this is.
Yes, people like you can look at the code and understand it, but you (generically anyway) cannot communicate what it means to Joe Sixpack.
If a "Linux scene whore" can say "ooh, I grok the kernel" s/he is more likely to do things like buy posters and yammer about how cool/great Linux is to non-Linux users.
Pretty pictures are as important to Open Source as they are to any other grass-roots movement.
So we have slashdotted as a "industry recognized term" now.
But what about those sites that CREEP, SHUDDER, MOAN, and SMOKE but still eek out small packets of info every now and then. I propose
Slashdotdotdotted
As in here is a little info...and...somemore...etc.
Not that I think this is the best suggestion, but feel free to propose something else
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
Perhaps the pluggin to which you refer was cosmo player, a Virtual Realm Modelling Language browser w Netscape/iE pluggin.
It would be useless without a VERY high speed graphics card. More than about 10,000 polygons would jitter like crazy. Can you say 3 frames a second. (It's an interpreted language from HELL!!! Imagine the 3D version of 'printable' graphics using html 2.0). I wouldn't try it in a browser.
Now a 3D IGES file, that would be cool.
There are/were linux VRML browsers coming along ages ago. I should go back & check on them.
No warranty of any kind is offered as to the quality of this post.
this one shows how the Kernel, KDE and an application interact
---
Political Correctness is doubleplusungood.
Visual literacy is as important as code literacy. SOMETIMES (I repeat sometimes) it's a little lacking in open projects. The coders sometimes chase off designers (visual as apposed to textual thinkers). I think this is usefull because it gets it all in one eyefull. If you can't understand why people would spend the time then maybe you're not seeing something.
Who are you to say who can and can't make a contribution.
No warranty of any kind is offered as to the quality of this post.
As I zoomed in on the kernal map, I couldn't help rephrasing a Steven Wright joke:
I have a map of the Linux kernal...
the scale is one line equals one line.
(The original joke was: I have a map of the United States... the scale is one mile equals one mile.)
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I've seen diagrams of Unix from the 70's that had exactly the same structure to them. Nothing new.
Furthermore, Solaris has been inherently modular (and has evolved to have fine grained locking and an almost fully preemptible kernel) since SVR4 was adopted by Sun as the basis for Solaris. I can't see spending the time to map Solaris too, but I bet if someone did, it would look exactly the same.
Dont' get me wrong, this is a nifty tool, looks neat, etc. But if someone wants to use it to claim uniqueness for Linux, they're barking up the wrong source tree.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
not to say that people shouldn't try ...
... it worked.
Girls are strange. They don't come with a man page.
-- Michael Mattsson
You are a genius!
IT beats thrashing or "excessive paging", or congested, or "bogged down by trolls."
well, its synonymous with "bogged down by trolls"
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Here is a much simpler and more informative archiecture model that is browsable from our research group. It requires a Java-enabled browser and some patience for the initial loading of the data.
See also the paper at the Intl Conf on Software Engineering that was written around it.
can't really say what the real use of this is. sure, send me a fat postscript to plot on an A1 paper to redecorate my livingroom, that i could use. but this. naah..
Girls are strange. They don't come with a man page.
-- Michael Mattsson
Yeah, but what about Windows?
A quick Google Images search popped up a nice visualization of the Windows kernel.
And I believe this is their development model.
My SIG is a SG-552 Commando
...I wonder what would the Win2K kernel look like?
Probably has a picture of Bill Gates in the middle or something. Or maybe the sentence "640K ought to be enough for anyone." How about the letters "M-O-N-O-P-O-L-Y"???
what i would really like to see is this on a T-Shirt or at least a pocket emblem. Another neat thing would be as a screen saver that randomly explores diffrent levels of the kernel. ya that would be cool.
It's all Politics
We think modularity of the source code is one of the important strategic advantages that the Linux Community has and we wanted to move beyond a magnifying glass on the kernel map poster to make it browsable and to let the community add new features.
Gee, thanks for making this. This map obviously allows the community to add new features -- something we were never able to do before!
Zounds.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Bull you tell people to buy or do the most expesive thing and then you tell them to "go with on of your partners" it classi bs. IT OR NOT.
> It would be cool to see the evolution of the kernel.
Check this.
sPh
04.07.02
- Disturbing Peace is going away for awhile. They will be taking 3 months off to work hard on new material.
THEY'LL BE BACK...
03.30.02
- Disturbing Peace won 3rd place at Mosh Core. All the bands had fun at Mosh Core everything ran smooth. D.P. would like to give a big thanks to everyone who cam to support Montréal's local scene. Thanks go out to all the bands "Mr. Kyte, Evolution, Anatory, Dead cores, Mad Hatters, Biocide, Peeping Tom, Fist of Freedom and First Version"
02.21.02
- Disturbing Peace will be play at Club Soda March 29th. Mosh Core 2002 (Battle of the bands) - Click Here for more info
- D.P. will be also releasing there Merchandise if all goes well
02.14.02
- D.P. Won the Emergenza competition they will be moving on to round 2 at Club Soda in May. Wish them Luck!
That's right. Linux should be left underwater with the rest of those fat slow bloated penguins.
A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain that Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld.
This thing is really cool, and I'm sure every linux geek could find a spot for it in their cube or office, but its way overpriced.
30$ is just too much for a poster.
I bet they could sell 5 times as many if they cut the price in half.
To demonstrate the magnitude and complexity of what can be accomplished through open-source software development, someone should project the entire Kernal image onto some enourmous structure, such as the moon, or the side of a building, or a football field, or a convention ceiling.
$8.95/mo web hosting
Since visualization is on prime time on /. today, I generated a couple of visualizations of the kernel using a tool I designed for visualizing large data structures.
Look at it by clicking on the third image here if you want some explanations of the underlying research, or go directly here if you prefer.
Enjoy!
Actually, I think the map of NT kernel looks more like a tourist
map of Camp David.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
It's a diagram. It's not useful at the highest level of zoom; indeed, you can't note anything useful from the first five levels of zoom. Maps are used to allow you to pick out useful information about terrain from a high-level overview; this simply doesn't do that, due to having too few recognizibale symbols to serve as landmarks.
I hope somebody eventually comes up with a good way to map source code; unfortunately this isn't it.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
My God, it's full of Tux!
Note to ACs: I won't mod you up, even if you are being funny or insightful. So take a chance! It's not real life!
Great, now my washing machine is displaying a blue screen of death :-(
The graph is really neat, but I am kind of disappointed that it doesn't show much inter-file information (the position of source file boxes is essentially arbitrary, and there are no indications of connections between them)...
One thing I would love to see is some kind of graph that shows the dependencies between source files. i.e. who calls functions in this file; who is called by functions in this file; what headers does this file depend on (taking recursive inclusions into account), etc. That kind of information is really important when trying to understand code, even my own. (e.g. it should be really easy to spot unwanted header dependencies which are otherwise difficult to detect).
I am aware of some scripts based on GraphViz, like "cinclude2dot.pl" But the results aren't really what I am looking for.
It's a cool thing that not only looks good, but means something too! Very Fractal like! Nice Hack!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Open Source is an active area of interest inside BCG mainly because it represents an innovative way to organize people to meet a goal.
:)
IT workers of the world, unite!
In news that won't be new to the unions, this can effectively be translated as "the corporations want your labour free, or extremely cheap". A good reason to choose the GPL rather than the BSD when writing free software/open source... at least they'll be forced to share any changes they make to your code.
deus does not exist but if he does
Take for example the shining wit from sentry.seaspace.com (192.150.113.5). First, with charming naivete, he tries to give a wildcard to an HTTP request:
GET /tiles/zoom064/x014400_y019200/* HTTP/1.0
D'oh! But our hero is not foiled so easily. Next, he tries to write a little script to download the images using wget, but unfortunately a 1-line shell script seems to be too hard. The server sees about a hundred requests like this, for nonexistent files.
GET /tiles/zoom064/x014400_y019200/x.big.png
If something doens't work, just try harder! Another attempt at this lame little script misinterprets the filename coding and produces a few thousand requests for other nonexistent files.
You might think that somebody who's written a script like this would keep an eye on it to see if it's working properly, rather than allowing it to run for an hour getting one error message after another. But apparently not for Mr Seaspace. Has he gone off to apply his l33t leeching skills to some other site? Is he tending to his goats? We'll never know.
Ka-plunk.
Your reasoning is good, re: marketing. Sounds like a nice simple sales point. Maybe we should start an open source comercial/ad to use it. :-)
BUT
It COULD be the beginning of something usefull for coders too, for reasons I have already explained elsewhere.
No warranty of any kind is offered as to the quality of this post.
And they hired Sigourney Weaver, IIRC...
And it had nasty bugs, too...
It looks like a really interesting technique. However, the value of the second page (and your linux credibility :-) is somewhat eroded by the fact that the images don't show up. Looking at the HTML shows lines like this:
<img src="file:///F:/kernel-2.5.33-drivers.png" alt="">
Oops.
This represents a program. It would be interesting to see how far one could take the paradigm by writing an interpreter for this diagram. What would it be like to code this way (obvious VB trolls excluded)? I've always thought that what makes the upper echelon of coders great is that they can visualize their code in a similar manner.
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
Someone could create a fractal of the "Linux Kernel"! That would be great, wouldn't it?
you are my hero! can you get the dog to fuck her next time?
This was not that, I remember Cosmo Player.
This was not realy a 3d render more like a 3d lable viewer.
You could create text lablels and link them to other lables. Which would then be rendewred in a 3d space that you could navigate through.
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
Sounds much better.
No warranty of any kind is offered as to the quality of this post.
It wasn't true 3D. you caould just zoom in and out. or move towards a label.
I'm still trying to remember what it was called
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
There's a pretty simple answer to that. I'm the BCG partner who initiated this idea. I'm in charge of our new investments in strategy (Bob Wolf and Karim Lakhani are colleagues in this group). One of our areas of investigation has been Free/Open Source Software. We are most definitely NOT driven by a focus on the IT and purchasing issues surrounding GNU/Linux, but rather on the strategic lessons of it's success.
If "organizations" like these can be so competitive (and who in the world is a tougher competitor than Microsoft?), then there's got to be important new lessons in how this model works. At multiple levels.
The poster was really helpful to us in visualizing the different pieces of the kernel. But you needed a magnifying glass to get deeper into it. I asked Karim why it wasn't available on line. The answer was, "no good reason", it just hadn't been done yet. So we decided to sponsor a small effort to take the files that went into the poster and put it all up here (thanks to Rusty!). We know that there's a lot more you could do to make it better, but we figured "release early and often" and let the users add the features they wanted. Perfection wasn't the goal.
So we hope some people find it useful. I know it was said as criticism, but I really do think it is a work of art, not unlike Mandelbrot sets as a fractal image.