Gear 1.0

Gear 1.0

Background

The operating system is a huge software, to understand the principle of the system is a very difficult thing. This also happens in the operating system teaching and learning. How to describe it simply and clearly has become a very challenging problem. 

The confusion for many years after the emergence DTrace finally let us see a glimmer of hope. Through DTrace's dynamic tracking, using specific scripts, we can make real-time, dynamic tracking all parts of the system, from creations of processes, signal sending to a small system call. And with these tracking information we develop a system information visualization tool—Gear.

Feature

We use DTrace to get system data which we are interested in. And after these information has been analyzed, they can be shown by Gear in an animation way. So the whole system is alive displayed to us, we can feel it, observe it, and understand it. By using Gear, the teaching of OS will become completely different.Instead of  boring algorithm and colorless graphics, it will be vivid. We can get a visual reflection of the OS. These real-time animation and visualization charts can help us more easily to understand and learn the OS. Of course, these are only the system performance, if you want to understand the operating system completely you must learn those algorithms deeply. 

Because of the complexity of the system, to build a display of the entire operating system software is extremely complex and difficult. Therefore, we choose the plug-in mechanism to realize the whole system. We have developed a simple application framework that allows us to add new features depended on the form of plug-in framework. So if we are going to display another part of the operating system the only thing we need to do is to develop a new plug-in. The entire framework is released by the way of the free software (under LGPL), anyone who would like to develop plug-in of new functions can freely get the framework of the source code and documentation. We hope more people to share more useful plug-in, we hope that through our efforts, the operating system teaching could become simpler, and the operating system could be more easily used and understandable.

Screen Shot