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A 3D Animation of Kernel Source Development
fixit! writes "Have a
look at this cool 3D animation of the Linux kernel source. This is how a source browser should look like!"
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← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
brings back memories of all those "flying through the human body" type videos.
Art meets science... amazing that someone took the time to do this just for the fun of it.
Quite creative.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
How is this related in any way, shape, or form to the original post?
It would be nice to see major errors identified and then fixed in the movies as well.
...very interesting... but stupid.
What can I say, I don't care if it's useful or not, it's just looks damn nice.
At least the actual page itself is nice and lightweight. Might keep the server from imploding for at least a few minutes...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Mplayer is your friend!
...You should have seen some of the "sex on campus"
seven degrees of separation white boards from my college days!
(Yes, my "small patch" was rejected as too small to bother including)
hosting images and mpegs on a site in france, jeeze, depending on the story popularity, this site could be down in a matter of minutes ;\
Since it doens't use anyhting but transparency effects, you wouldn't be too impressed with the end result. All you'd see is some lines and opaque boxes. My first reaction to looking at the mpeg was "yeah, so?". It doesn't look too original, and certainly isn't very interesting. I guess I just don't get it, but it doesn't seem to serve any real purpose.
NightmareDNS =)
Stay tuned for an important announcement...
Entertainment has become mandatory!
I'd do it, but I'm on 56k. Can any of you broadband people with webspace please mirror the mpgs and post them in a reply to this thread? The bandwidth bills are high enough when someone gets Slashdotted, I don't even want to see what they would be like after getting Slashdotted by people downloading 4-12MB files.
For those people still hungry for karma, I'm SURE this would get you some.
The manpage. Really.
I can see this guy getting a 120Gb bandwidth bill for today.
I'm going to go ahead and test my university's bandwidth by mirroring the movies at http://www.public.iastate.edu/~omikron/linux3d/
Oh, and I suppose you've never tried to have any fun.
It helps you easily see how cluttered and interlinked parts of the kernel are, and by comparison, how clean others are.
I liked the way it went into detail(sorta) on the net/, seeing ipv4 compared to ipv6, etc.
Then again, its 4:17am and I'm sleep deprived. I'd be impressed by anything more intelectually stimulating than girls gone wild infomercials.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
The first 90% of the movie looked like Missile Command from the Atari 2600 days, and the last 10% looked like I was speeding towards a two-dimensional line-drawn battle-tank (also like an Atari 2600 game).
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
What channel?
http://mynetpad.com/mirror/perso.wanadoo.fr/pascal .brisset/kernel3d/kernel3d.html
I like to build things and wire stuff together.
I watched the whole animation hoping that in it I would find the hidden mysteries of getting multimedia to work on my multimedia neutered Redhat 8.0 box. Oh well.
http://somacore.com/slash3d/
they really aren't worth it.
NightmareDNS =)
fixit! writes "Have a look at this cool 3D animation of the Linux kernel source. This is how a source browser should look like!"
;-)
That's all nice and cool, but could we have a 3D shooter next where you can use a BFG#### to go bughunting?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I caught a glimpse of Johnny Mnemonic in there!
At 25mb total it will get /.ed fast though, so please mirror it and post the link.
This would have been a lot more impressive if they had actually used java to animate the schematic instead of a static movie. Something along the lines of this...
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/index.jsp
Still cool, just not _slashdot_ cool.
Tetsuo? is that you? what happened?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
...the colors! Looooooook at the colors! AHH! Spiders! Spiders! Spiders! Spiders! Spiders! Spiders! Spiders! Spiders! Get 'em off of me!....Git! git! Get 'em off!!!
The linux 2.4.1 animation looks more like the crystalline entity from ST:tNG. Can you see Lor in there anywhere?
note: due to the absurd size of the movies, I'm just talking about the screenshot on the page itself. My 56k modem isn't going to like downloading those movies.
Mod trolls up. w3rd.
Can't find it, I've scanned through the manpage with egrep and came up emptyhanded, the optminization section doesn't contain any thints. I thought "-v" would do it, but no, it doesn't.
I shared the files in Kazaa. Look for "Linux Kernel 3D"
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
sdfsdfsdfsdf
The server will fade out sooner or later, so I put up a gnutella mirror of the first linked video "A guided tour of Linux-2.4.5: 9 MB MPEG (384x288, 2000 frames)."
magnet:245.mpg
gnutella://245.mpg
ed2k://245.mpg"
More to follow?
Ok, interesting, can the author of this please explain us what exactly do the lines and colors represent?
Having a visual representation of something(anything) is always usefull or at least interesting but we the observers really need some data to interprete the image with our stupid little minds.
This is how a source browser should look like!
:
should have been
That was how a source browser should have looked like!
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
I think that since Linux is very clean, streamlined code
Perhaps you didn't actually read the page referred to in the story?:
---start quote---
The following code demonstrates exciting
features of GNU C used in Linux:
int a, b;
typedef int t, u;
void f1() { a * b; }
void f2() { t * u; }
void f3() { t * b; }
void f4() { int t; t * b; }
void f5(t u, unsigned t) {
switch ( t ) {
case 0: if ( u )
default: return;
}
}
---end quote---
This kind of code is CRAP. I don't know who wrote it, I don't care if he/she is a genius kernel guru. Hard to read, hard to maintain.
234234ewrqwer
I swear that looks like the kernel has four-dimensional dependancies there...
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
This is geeky, but it says on the manual page "-O3 Optimize yet more. -O3 turns on all optimizations specified by -O2 and also turns on the -finline-functions and -frename-registers options."
I'm a girl too! See naked chicks in my journal!
>P.S. Does anyone else think that it would be nice to have such a map printed in high detail on a large black poster?
i e/3884/
You can get something like that here http://www.thinkgeek.com/cubegoodies/posters/tech
Your problem isn't a gcc flag, it's that YOUR code is BROKEN.
A very specific niche comment/query...
I'm not a programmer (BASIC doesn't count, right? :p ), but I have observed the development of a few open source projects and have seen the effects of code being introduced by programmers who have valuable contributions, but interact poorly with the rest of the source (usually novices). So, veterens, could this type of map, applied to the project in question, drive home the point and help mold the newbie into better practices, or are we better off oohing and ahhhing now and moving on to the next article?
Bored with karma, be a fan/freak
The other ones:
"From 1.2.0 to 2.4.1: 12 MB MPEG (384x288, 1400 frames)":
magnet:120-240.mpg
gnutella://120-240.mpg
ed2k://120-240.mpg
"From 1.2.0 to 2.4.1: 4 MB MPEG (320x240, 1200 frames, low motion)":
magnet:120-240s.mpg
gnutella://120-240s.mpg
ed2k://120-240s.mpg
btw, untill somebody loads them in their eDonkey client the files won't show up on that network. Just there for compatibilty. Shareaza can generate them anyway.
this is damn cool... how about turning those lines into pipes where i can ruhn through in ego perspektive with a gun.. and in every piece of code charakter will be generated with the programmers names and i can shoot them all down.. fuck...
I wish I had these tools when I was a teenager, I am very astounded.
This is cool. I wonder what the FreeBSD kernel looks like with this.
Here you go:
Exactly what you need on the GNU website
A good rule of thumb for finding information with GNU software is:
1. Check the man page
2. Check the info page (ESPECIALLY with GNU software... tar doesn't even have an official manpage)
3. Check gnu.org
4. Check the source.
5. IRC? (especially the freenode IRC network channels, such as #debian.
Please don't ask Slashdot!
--3141
wanadoo.fr is a French ISP; perso.wanadoo.fr is their "free web space" domain, so at the most they'll just cut access to that site
They probably won't even notice - and it's holding up ok at the moment.
(or not)
---
That link again: Linux Kernel Poster
... there's a bug above you!
OO..I think I spotted an error in net/sch_prio.c at line 217...back up...wait...pause..no...I was mistaken...it's right..
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
Yes, very hard to read
- can someone explain it ?
Is it just obfuscation or something clever ?
This is how a source browser should look like!
That's a cool link, but the grammar there makes me cry, causes physical pain to small kittens, and makes babies turn blue. It would make Jesus weep too if the proliferation of "wierd", "loose" and "definately" hadn't already.
"This is how a source browser should look" and "This is what a source browser should look like" would both be much more comforting.
The kittens would thank you graciously.
Nice one. This is wicked. Hope the authors keep having fun.
chris at darkrock dot co dot uk
http colon slash slash www dot darkrock dot co dot uk
For comparison, here are a few animations of Windows
getSexySig();
Slow news day?
Would anyone mind explaining what this code does?
Yes, that is interesting indeed.
I think in general there may be interesting research to be done in the area of mapping/visualization of complex data: for instance this project of mapping the internet.
Does this really help in general? Are there many cases where such visual maps would help understanding of complex data?
Think for example, it may be interesting to produce such a map of everything2, which is a sort of hyperlinked online encyclopedia, to see where the clustering is.
In astrophysics, 3D maps of the universe have been produced for some time, and the human-eye understanding of large-scale structure was at first more direct than statistical analysis--for instance, people would see the famous filaments, but stats wouldn't.
A post above quoted the possible use in spotting "usefulness" of code contributions, by looking at their interdependencies for example.
yours ever, fz.
Can someone make a screensaver outta that?. That looks cool though it doesnt make anmy sense to me
Now I know what it looks like, I want to know what it sounds like too.
It doesn't do much of anything; it just shows off some of the more perverse corners of C, and that you can't get away with writing a minimalist parser to pull off something like this project--you have to go nearly whole hog, including at least enough of a symbol table to tell whether a * b; is a pointless expression or a declaration of a pointer to some typedef-ed type.
Looks very cool and all. Cloud be part of a demo, with some neat music too it. It doesn't help me any to get a overview of changes. A traditional "2d"-brows through my kernel-tree with some diffs would tell me more. But I guess that was not the whole point of the project.
Really worth downloading (or streaming or whatever you prefer with your mplayer)
Hey! That's my sig you're smoking there!
its interesting to see how a computer program can look like a galaxy
Geez!
That's not actual code from the kernel source. It's an example of what kind of code gcc compiles and why it's hard to write a gcc-C parser.
The real kernel code is mostly easy to read for humans (because they have no problem with context recognition).
... but I think I'll stick with "more" for looking at the kernel sources for now.
Parsing C makess my brain hurt.
This must be the source browser the MovieOS kernel hackers use.
For centuries architects have been using 2d plans to understand copmlex 3d buildings. Kewlness aside, why do programmers always want to reverse this process?
My first computer was an Atari ST. The MWC (Mark Williams C) compiler that I bought with it came with an amazing little C demo program. It must have been 15 lines of C code tops. The Atari ST has an 680x0 cpu chip, and a linear memory model. A chunk of that memory was set aside for video, and a separate chip pumped that video memory out to the monitor. With the C demo program, you could change the base video memory pointer to point anywhere in memory, including low memory, where the operating system (TOS/GEM) resided. By doing this, you could actually WATCH the operating system in action, because each pixel on the video monitor represented one bit! You could see counters counting up, flag bits flip-flopping on and off, chunks of bits being read in from the floppy disk, etc. It is, by far, the coolest thing I've ever seen done with a computer. =) Wish I could figure out how to do it on my linux box.
My personal one liner is... "Seen on Ebay: 1000 French Military Rifles. Like new; only droped once."
I can't remember if GCC assigns attributes to symbols so it is possible to keep track of code references but to forget the data references, but that would mean chasing through the debug symbol format.
See my journal, I write things there
Finally the killer application that will convert the masses!
Better start dancing Ballmer, if you want to beat this...
I've been wanting to try that same thing for some time now. Ball and spring source files. I even thought Linux would be more interesting than any of my projects. You've proved all that correct! I was hoping to ray trace it though and allow grabbing and stretching/pulling via mouse. If you can output a text file for the connectivity I can do RT quickly, the challenge was going to be parsing everything. I figured this could help with code structuring - you want low connectivity for clean code. Or at least loosely connected small tangles. I suspect this would show most people that their code is more of a mess than they realize.
Wow, you mean there is something useful about wanadoo.fr. Time to take them off the firewall block long enough to at least check this out.
sees when he has nightmares.
Anyone else getting turned on by this?
CAPS LOCK IS LIKE CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL!
At least the evolution animation was flawed. The evolution would imply the linear progression, but at fork points, stable releases with lower numbers were released well after development versions of higher numbers. For it to be the most accurate, you would have to only follow a kernel series to the fork point, then switch to the newer fork and ignore releases in the stable fork. 2.0.38 was released well after 2.1.0, though the animation suggests 2.1.0 as the immediate succesor to 2.0.38
I know, it's just eye candy, but thought I'd call them on it since no one else has...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
That he chose WMA (Windows Media Player) format for his linux kernel animation.
My rights don't need management.
Can I submit my patch as a jpeg?
Does anyone know if there infact /is/ a source browser, open source or not, that even remotely represents that gibsonian cyberspace/matrix style presentation???
/HEAVEN/ with something like that at work.
I would be in
Not bad for about 5k lines of commented code. The largest source file is the ML grammer for the C language.
For their pure expressive power I don't see why FP languages get more respect. But I guess folks like Graham would mind that.
when IBM goes to court to fight SCO. I know this is offtopic, but SCO should have read "Just for Fun" before launching their suit. So many holes...
I know what the Internet is, what the hell is this Interweb business?!
Anyone want to make a screensaver of that? :-)
My pikey KDE fileserve will probably be /.ed in about 3 minutes. Nevertheless:
Boom goes my PC!
If you're happy and you know it read my blog
I have whined for a long time that programming is the last engineering discipline that isn't automated. We still essentially write prose.
Back at CMU in the late 1980's I played around with SPICE (an electrical CAD package), attempting to build a graphical programming environment for Pascal. Eventually I hypothesized a 3D model, with axes for data & types, control flow and I/O. Using SPICE I defined software IC's and was able to connect them together. Then the output could be parsed into Pascal source. I never took it to the point of anything working, although I did get some pretty nice looking graphical 'programs' that woulda worked - for sure!!
IMHO there is still a strong potential for something like this - perhaps the advent of the "Web Services" model (which separates applications from interfaces) will encourage design of at least large scale systems using methods similar to those used for designing chemical plants (for example).
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Nice looking animations, but it is a shame that he used a custom renderer. It would be interesting to see this as a plugin to some serious viewer tool, complete with hyperlinks to display source files or a code browser at particular points in the graph.
My faith in the people of France has been restored.
Bowie J. Poag
This is really a neat project. Makes me think of all the times when our managers are breathing fire down our necks and demanding to know what we've been doing all the time.
::)
Take this project, make it generic for any (C, for now, then extending to other languages) code, add in CVS/RCS/[insert your CM tool here] hooks, then slap a 20-30 MB MPEG on the boss' desktop when he goes off.
Seriously, though, I think this could be a useful tool in evaluating complexity (risk) in a large project or just for managment of the software development in general. "Geez--looks like this corner is really dynamic. What's going on there?" or "Wow. This group over here hasn't been touched in ages. Are we falling behind here?" The CM tool hooks are the most blazingly obvious needs in my mind for such a project to work--it's the best way to get a time history of the development.
--- Standard disclaimer applies.
There's just too much information to be displayed. Its nice for showing things like how the directory structure evolved within the kernel, or how quickly dependencies grew but you can't tell one file from another, and the contents are far more important than the directory structure. In short, nothing can feasibly replace a rejection with a short explaination and request for resubmission.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
...Perl code less readable than that.
Map? Black poster? Got the obligatory black light?
Hell no!
I want a screensaver for this, the first dyed-in-the-wool screen saver just for Leenuks!
You know, after looking at it for a while I don't even see the colored pixels and lines... all I see is driver functions, memory management routines, process management code....
-Thomas
So who is making a screensaver out of this for me??
it's beautiful... brings tears to my eyes... *sniff*
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
This is just dying for a comment: :)))
Wow man! It's, like... he hacked the Gibson, dude!
-- Sig down