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Linux Software

A 3D Animation of Kernel Source Development 191

Posted by michael from the moving-pictures dept.
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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A 3D Animation of Kernel Source Development More

A 3D Animation of Kernel Source Development

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  • 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.

  • Errors (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BenjaminHall ( 201202 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @06:10AM (#5466249)
    It would be nice to see major errors identified and then fixed in the movies as well.
  • What can I say, I don't care if it's useful or not, it's just looks damn nice.
  • ... three multi-megabyte MPEGs. That's just irresponsible, guys.

    At least the actual page itself is nice and lightweight. Might keep the server from imploding for at least a few minutes...

    • Actually, they seem to be sitting on a fairly fat pipe - with 100+ comments on /., I was still able to get an average speed of more than 50KB/s - from Japan!
    • I was getting them at almost two megabytes per sec; obviously a major French ISP is up to the task of, er, providing internet services.

  • Not that impressive... (Score:5, Funny)

    by case_igl ( 103589 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @06:12AM (#5466258) Homepage
    ...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)
  • 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.
  • I can see this guy getting a 120Gb bandwidth bill for today.

    • Re:Owch (Score:3, Insightful)

      by terraformer ( 617565 )
      I mirrored 1 meg of files from a /. article once and I got hit with 1GB of data transfer. There are 24Megs worth of video on that page...

  • Eeeevil (Score:5, Informative)

    by Omikr0n ( 656115 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @06:16AM (#5466276)
    I'm going to go ahead and test my university's bandwidth by mirroring the movies at http://www.public.iastate.edu/~omikron/linux3d/
    • I'm going to go ahead and test my university's bandwidth by mirroring the movies at http://www.public.iastate.edu/~omikron/linux3d/


      Don't bother - I've just pulled it across at 220kB/s - they've got bandwidth to spare.

    • thankyou.
  • Reading slashdot in the middle of the night has its advantages, I was able to view the 4 meg movie without any apparent slashdot slowdown ;-).

    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).

  • 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.

  • mirror (Score:1, Informative)

    by NightmareDNS ( 145903 )
    http://somacore.com/slash3d/

    they really aren't worth it.

  • Browsing is step one (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jedi Alec ( 258881 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @06:22AM (#5466298)
    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? ;-)

  • Hey! (Score:3, Funny)

    by freedom_leffo ( 605662 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @06:23AM (#5466299)
    I caught a glimpse of Johnny Mnemonic in there!

  • This would have been a lot more impressive (Score:4, Informative)

    by pcx ( 72024 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @06:25AM (#5466306)
    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? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rhinobird ( 151521 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @06:28AM (#5466309) Homepage
    Tetsuo? is that you? what happened?

  • OH MY GOD.... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...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!!!

  • Now available in P2P (Score:4, Informative)

    by 10Ghz ( 453478 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @06:35AM (#5466322)
    I shared the files in Kazaa. Look for "Linux Kernel 3D"

  • Gnutella mirror (Score:2, Informative)

    by Henk Poley ( 308046 )
    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 [magnet]
    gnutella://245.mpg [gnutella]
    ed2k://245.mpg" [ed2k]

    More to follow?
  • This is how a source browser should look like!

    should have been :
    That was how a source browser should have looked like!

  • wtf? (Score:1)

    by zephc ( 225327 )
    I swear that looks like the kernel has four-dimensional dependancies there...

  • Uses? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by shivianzealot ( 621339 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @06:54AM (#5466367)

    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?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • 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 wish I had these tools when I was a teenager, I am very astounded.
  • 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.

  • Finally! (Score:5, Funny)

    by zozzi ( 576178 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @06:57AM (#5466380)
    Finally a true clear picture of the kernel! With this concise clear and stunning graphical 3d image I can finally progress beyond the Hello World modules. Lost in a function? Not sure how the kernel works? I'll just look at the wonderful lines and dots buried in the haze of blue and hey presto! All is revealed. Thank you for the amazing contribution to the world of computer science! Next up: a graphical representation of all the source code bits after mangled through a blender..stay tuned!

    (or not)

  • ... there's a bug above you!

  • Sharp Eyes (Score:3, Funny)

    by ArmedGeek ( 562115 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @07:04AM (#5466391) Homepage Journal
    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..
  • Nice one. This is wicked. Hope the authors keep having fun.

  • Windows (Score:5, Funny)

    by KoolDude ( 614134 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @07:16AM (#5466411)

    For comparison, here are a few animations of Windows [animationlibrary.com]

    • Re:Windows (Score:1, Funny)

      by elmindreda ( 531590 )
      du ser ut som en motorbåt.
    • One of the animations shows Sun in Windows, which clearly demonstrates that MS has 'borrowed' from the Solaris code. Now we are only left to wonder, how did they manage to still build such a buggy app. with such a good codebase?

  • visualizing complex data (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fiiz ( 263633 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @07:33AM (#5466436) Homepage
    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 [cybergeography.org].

    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 [everything2.com], which is a sort of hyperlinked online encyclopedia, to see where the clustering is.

    In astrophysics, 3D maps of the universe [noao.edu] 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.

  • Screensaver (Score:2, Interesting)

    by krishy ( 461184 )
    Can someone make a screensaver outta that?. That looks cool though it doesnt make anmy sense to me
    • There's plenty of screensavers that'll allow you to just feed an .mpg or .avi file for example, or in some cases even a whole playlist.

      I use this one [softdd.com] under Windows, surely something similar exists under whatever OS you happen to be running...

  • Yes, but... (Score:2, Funny)

    by rob_canoe ( 471581 )
    Now I know what it looks like, I want to know what it sounds like too.
    • easy.... `tar -cjvf kernel.tar.bz2 /usr/src/linux && cat kernel.tar.bz2 > /dev/dsp` this is actually quite pleasant to listen to while working as it is soothing like classical music.
      • klasikahl, wouldn't it be much simpler to just

        tar -cvj /usr/src/linux/* > /dev/dsp

        That would start playing almost immediately and not leave any files laying around. On my computer, the product of that is only white noise and not too soothing... however, your HD's swap space often holds interesting secrets, and listening to them is only one dd away (well, one su or sudo, too).
      • Actually, to cut the file out of that loop, one could just do:
        $ tar -czf - /usr/src/linux >> /dev/dsp&
        But anyway.... it's still horrendous and evil. :)
  • 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)
  • its interesting to see how a computer program can look like a galaxy
  • ... but I think I'll stick with "more" for looking at the kernel sources for now.
  • For centuries architects have been using 2d plans to understand copmlex 3d buildings. Kewlness aside, why do programmers always want to reverse this process?
    • Regrettably 3d paper wasn't available!

      Actually, for thousands of years, architects have used models. 2-D is great for construction but not for perceiving relationships, or explaing the building to others. Now the 3-d model is on the computer, it is easier to produce virtual models and they are done all the time.

  • watching the bits on an Atari ST (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 08, 2003 @09:37AM (#5466636)
    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.

    • Re:watching the bits on an Atari ST (Score:4, Informative)

      by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @01:17PM (#5467435)
      Tandy's line of CoCo computers worked the same way with video. Set a couple registers to tell the video generator which part of system RAM to treat as video and watch the operating system state displayed on-screen.

      It was mildly amusing from time to time.

      My workplace recently bought all us programmers new Gateway systems where the integrated video card (a GeForce model) uses the same technology for video as the CoCo from the past. Figure out how to tell the board which part of system memory should be treated as video, and the same effect could be had.
  • 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.

  • Interesting, but flawed... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Junta ( 36770 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @11:23AM (#5466945)
    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...
  • 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;
    }
    }
    Also why is such code used in the kernel? I know there are practical reasons for things like "do {} while (0)" but the code above just looks deliberately obfuscated.
    • Having no idea where this code came from, I'll take a wild guess and say it's a test of some kind. Could be testing the current compiler optimization (most of this could be optimized away), or testing how long it takes to perform some code (where an empty loop isn't desired).
      Am I close?
  • Can I submit my patch as a jpeg?

  • 3D Programming (Score:2, Interesting)

    by garyebickford ( 222422 )
    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).

  • My faith in the people of France has been restored.

  • Interesting project... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Ahotasu ( 206241 )
    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.
  • 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

  • gasp (Score:2)

    by Xpilot ( 117961 )
    it's beautiful... brings tears to my eyes... *sniff*

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