Research On Windows Operating Process Visualization

Operating system is an important subject of computer science, researching on this subject is very important for us to understand the mechanisms of operating system and do the computer research. However, because this subject involves theoretical concepts and complex mechanisms, we usually have to pay a lot of time to gain a full understanding because of its abstraction. The traditional model, in which the lecturer follows a textbook, prepares and exhibits slides, and presents some theoretical exercises, is not enough to assure a precise comprehension of what is being taught. The problem is due to both the teaching model and the lack of appropriate tools capable of translating the theory being presented into a more practical reality. And without a practical vision the students tend to lose touch and just "float" around the introduced concepts and mechanisms without gaining a realistic grasp of what is really going on.In recent years, visualization technology develops fast and shows obvious advantages in improving the human cognitive abilities. It's already used in medicine, geography,health care,software development,education and so on, it is combined with internet information search,software visualization,data mining. The main purpose of this paper is to present how to use information visualization in teaching and researching of operating systems.We use visualization technology in the kernel functions and data structures based on the real data collected from the running OS. We present the operating process details visually. The main points of this paper are showed as follows:1,Illustrate the theories of visualization, present it's development and application of the recent years. Emphasize the concepts and key points of information visualization and do some research on the differences of OS visualization and normal software visualization. Present a normal and practical approach on the OS visualization. 2,According to the data structures of every entities defined in the Windows source codes, we show the visualization methods of the properties and functions of them, and we define some descriptions of the functions of OS to make it easier to realize our visualization system. This paper also gives some visualization examples such as CPU, exterior hardware.3,Taking the progress of thread scheduling as an example, we use this visualization system to show the real operating process Windows operating system. We also give some pictures different states of the entities at different times to prove that visualization is a practical approach for the operating system research and learning.At the last section of this paper, some examples are presented to display the effects of the visualization system.