A Visual Expedition Inside the Linux File Systems 85
RazvanM writes "This is an attempt to visualize the relationships among the Linux File Systems through the lens of the external symbols their kernel modules use. We took an initial look a few months back but this time the scope is much broader. This analysis was done on 1377 kernel modules from 2.6.0 to 2.6.29, but there is also a small dip into the BSD world. The most thorough analysis was done on Daniel Phillips's tree, which contains the latest two disk-based file systems for Linux: tux3 and btrfs. The main techniques used to establish relationships among file systems are hierarchical clustering and phylogenetic trees. Also presented are a set of rankings based on various properties related to the evolution of the external symbols from one release to another, and complete timelines of the kernel releases for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. In all there are 78 figures and 10 animations."
BSD? (Score:3, Interesting)
So they finally managed to recover DNA evidence on BSD's corpse [jhu.edu] after all. Hopefully we'll find out who killed it.
Seriously, what a useless "analysis". It's all a bunch of unreadable tables, graphs and other things, such as the history of the number of exported symbols in the BSD kernel (yeah right...) nobody cares about.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Odd visualization, but not so bad (Score:5, Interesting)
My first reaction when browsing through the article was disgust about the measure being used. I couldn't see the value of graphs about the number of symbols used by different file-system modules. So vfat doesn't use kprintf, woo-fucking-hoo!
But then, the Hamming distance and hierarchical structure struck a chord. Huh, so NFS, uses a very different set of symbols than, ext3. (ok, this may be biased by NFS using a metric fuckton of external symbols where ext3 uses less), which implies that NFS is pretty different, internally, than ext3.
So now, I agree that such a visualisation, while very abstract from the implementation details, can be pretty useful to have a (very) rough overview of the filesystems and their code structure. And I think we need more abstract overviews like this.
Reminds me of Code Swarm [ucdavis.edu], which creates a movie of commits to a repository.
Re:Lick my (Score:2, Interesting)
Who types this?
But really I would like a visual expedition into the mind of whoever writes slashcode these days. I'm not even going to get started on UTF-8 support though. My problem is "Anonymous Cowardon". Latest Firefox stable shows no space between the two names (there is one, it's just tiny). It looks stupid, please fix.
I'd attach a screenshot, but I'd know better than to click on a link replying to a troll myself so you'll just have to imagine if your browser can render it correctly.