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Groups > linux.kernel > #1449550

Visualizing linux kernel datastructures

From Charlemagne Lasse <charlemagnelasse@gmail.com>
Newsgroups linux.kernel
Subject Visualizing linux kernel datastructures
Date 2016-07-25 17:00 +0200
Message-ID <rYPwm-5P2-7@gated-at.bofh.it> (permalink)
Organization linux.* mail to news gateway

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Hi,

I wanted to understand some modules in the kernel and how their data
structures are interconnected. So I am not interested in all data
structures of the kernel but something more like
net/bridge/br_private.h.

With C++ I would just tell doxygen to generate uml-like class
diagrams. But the kernel code is C and doesn't use templates. So it is
sometimes quite hard to find out what is behind a struct list_head or
an struct rb_root. Beside the missing information about the type of
objects stored in the dynamic data structure, it is also sometimes not
easy to know if a struct list_head is now an anchor for this item in a
list or if this is the root/head of the list.

So my questions would be:

1. is there a standard (machine readable?) how to correctly document
(kernel-doc?) in the code if a struct list_head is the head/root of a
list or the anchor of the item in a list?

2. is there a standard (machine readable?) how to correctly document
the type of objects stored in a list/hlist/rbtree?

3. is there already some kind of tool to visualize data structures
from the Linux kernel which supports list/hlist/rbtree and shows it in
the diagram (image, graphviz, ...) as 1:n relation?

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Thread

Visualizing linux kernel datastructures Charlemagne Lasse <charlemagnelasse@gmail.com> - 2016-07-25 17:00 +0200
  Re: Visualizing linux kernel datastructures Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> - 2016-07-25 19:50 +0200

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