Code Quality: Windows vs Linux vs FreeBSD vs Solaris

iliast — Sat, 17 May 2008 06:06:00 GMT

Diomidis Spinellis has written a good paper for the “30^th International Conference on Software Engineering” (ICSE ’08) that looks at the code quality of the source codes of Windows (WRK – Research Kernel based on Windows Server 2003), Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD. Diomidis has analyzed the source codes of these 4 kernels and uses some code metrics, in order to measure the quality of each kernel in each area.

For those, who don’t like reading lengthy texts, a summary of the results is at the end (section 5: summary and discussion). Each operating system has its own strengths and weaknesses, so there is no clear winner.

The paper can be found at http://www.spinellis.gr/pubs/conf/2008-ICSE-4kernel/html/Spi08b.pdf and all the queries for the code analysis can be found at http://www.spinellis.gr/sw/4kernel/.

Finally, Diomidis has a very lengthy list of classic reads at his website.

A Comparison of the Linux and Windows Device Driver Architectures

iliast — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 02:00:00 GMT

While searching for something irrelevant, I found a very interesting paper, called "A Comparison of the Linux and Windows Device Driver Architectures" by Melekam Tsegaye and Richard Foss. It was published at the ACM Operating Systems Review, Volume 38, Number 2, 2004. You can find a link to the paper here.

The paper compares the device driver architectures between linux and windows. It starts by providing an extensive analysis to both architectures and then presenting a detailed comparison. The paper covers the 2.4 linux kernel and the Windows Driver Model (WDM) from Windows XP, so it can be considered that it is quite up-to-date (at least from the Windows perspective). Also, in the same page, you'll find Melekam Tsegaye's MSc Thesis, which covers the same contents as the paper, but it also presents the design and the implementation of an IEEE-1394 driver for both windows and linux. Both drivers can be found here, while the presentation of the thesis can be found here.

driver writing != bus driving : Linux

Code Quality: Windows vs Linux vs FreeBSD vs Solaris

A Comparison of the Linux and Windows Device Driver Architectures