Exploration And Researches On Methods For Visualizing The Running Process Of Linux Operating System

As the basic system software, Operating system manages all the software and hardware resources on the computer, it ensure the excellent performance of the computer system and provide a good environment for development and implementation of procedures. It is the soul and core of the computer system. If you want to be familiar with computer system, OS is one of the most important parts for you to learn about. Excessive concepts, abstract objects and a wide range of theory are its three marked characters that make it be one of the most difficult subject to master in computer science speciality. So to find a quick and easy way to comprehend the abstract theories is always a goal for learners of OS. Learning the nature of OS without its source code is not practical. With the emergence of open-source OS software and the rapid development of software visualization achieving this goal is possible. The purpose of this paper is to apply software visualization theory to open-source Linux operating system, through visualizing the process of the key operation to achieve the goal of operating system's depth understanding.Linux is a member of the big family of Unix-Like operating systems. From the late 1990s, as a new member of the OS family the Linux operating system has become very popular and now become one of the most successful operating system. Open-source character is its greatest advantage. Its source can be downloaded free of charge under the GNU license. This resolves the previous embarrassing situation of no-source operating system study.Software visualization is a subject to study how to use interactive computer graphic technology and graphics, animation, audio, video and other means to enhance the understanding and efficiency using of algorithms and procedures. It belongs to the area of information visualization. As the basic software of the computer system, OS of course is the research subject of software visualization.This paper apply software visualization theory to Linux operating system and, through monitoring certain time period's OS implementation and meanwhile recording the related objects status changing , eventually use the recorded data to visualize the selected OS implementation process. The feature of this paper is the division of monitoring process and visualization process; we adopt a way of post data driving method to visualize the process of the OS execution and so overcome the problem brought by parallel management of monitoring operation and visualization operation. This paper not only provides a data acquisition mechanism in the process of running kernel, the data form definition and data-driven method; but also gives a cross-platform data reconstruction method based our need and the graphic representation method for the related objects and variables in the visualization. OS function is a direct reflection of the results of the program's implementation, so program visualization does a great help to understand the function of OS. Function implementation flow visualization method that is useful for program visualization also be given in this paper and plays a good supporting role in the understanding of function of the monitored procedure. In the end, the paper gives a visualization example about page fault interruption procedure to prove the feasibility of the methods for OS procedure visualization given in this paper.