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."
ThinkGeek has the Kernel map poster...
If this were being used by a company, in theory, it would work very well. You would be able to look at what you're working on and see quickly what it affects. But the image size would have to be much, MUCH bigger, and on paper. We have similar tools at work, Database Diagrams, and they are quite handy, at times.
find ~your -name '*base* | xargs chown
It's a visualization effect - BCG was kind enough to provide the resources to get the programming done, and we're providing the hosting for it.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
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 .