Slashdot Mirror
Graph of Linux Vs. Windows System Calls
cgrayson recommends Richard Stiennon's blog on ZDNet — a post titled Why Windows is less secure than Linux shows a compelling graphical comparison between system calls on the two operating systems. The blogger tips Sana Security for the images. Quoting: "In its long evolution, Windows has grown so complicated that it is harder to secure... [T]hese images... are a complete map of the system calls that occur when a web server serves up [the same] single page of [HTML] with a single picture."
Accurate or not, it's a graph of Apache vs. IIS calls, NOT Linux vs. Windows. Also old as hell.
Another quality article from Slashdot.
It's good that Slashdot is covering it, though. I do like the fact that we periodically get the chance to debunk some of the misinformation on the Web.
Taken completely out of its original context, the graphs are a useful way to compare real-world examples of C and C++ calling models, though. You'll notice that IIS (C++) has these "clusters" of activity where one routine acts as a nexus for calls into many others. This is fairly standard practice in C++ where you might have an accessor that triggers lots of behavior. In the C version, there's a much more visually procedural pattern where a function calls a few others, and then returns to a function that calls its tree of functions, but might overlap with a few calls to the previous function's utility functions, etc.
It's not hand drawn. They obviously used dot from graphviz. You can't mistake that layout once you've seen it.