Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Linux kernel
software evolution
software visualization
open source
Analysis and Visualization of the Linux Kernel's Software Evolution Using the City Metaphor
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the challenges of structural comprehension and evolution assessment arising from the massive scale of the Linux kernel codebase by proposing a 3D city metaphor visualization approach based on ExplorViz. Software metrics are mapped to building geometric dimensions and heatmaps, integrating Git commit parsing, custom metric computation, and Web-based frontend 3D rendering techniques to enable intuitive, interactive exploration of large-scale open-source projects. The proposed method successfully visualizes the complete file-level view of the kernel alongside the evolutionary trajectory of its Rust codebase. Consequently, this work provides efficient visual support for architectural analysis and historical evolution research in complex software systems.
📝 Abstract
The Linux kernel is one of the largest and longest-maintained open source projects in existence. With more than 40 million lines of code, understanding the kernel's internal structure and assessing its software evolution is a great challenge. In this paper, we present an approach to visualize the Linux kernel using our software visualization tool ExplorViz. We analyze commits from the Linux Git repository using a custom analysis service. The web-based frontend utilizes the 3D city metaphor for visualization of the software structure. Metrics such as the number of lines are collected for each file and are accumulated for directories and commits. Calculated metrics can be mapped to the building's dimensions or be displayed via a heat map. A wide range of visualization, search, and filter options enable the interactive exploration of the visualized data. We present both a visualization of all files in the kernel repository and a visual analysis of the code evolution of Rust files in the Linux kernel. Demo video: https://youtu.be/3ODnERqD8g0
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Software Visualization
City Metaphor
Software Evolution
Linux Kernel
ExplorViz
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