anderson

After being a heavy user of Robert Watson’s FreeBSD cross reference site (here) which indexes many different OS kernels, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Darwin, OpenSolaris, and more. It’s quite impressive, however, I often found the need to see the entire OS, and I’m mostly interested in the BSD’s. I ended up building a local version on my laptop, so I could take it with me wherever I went (it’s handy when you are on a plane). After using it quite a bit, I realized that I also wanted a version available to me on the web, that I can also use as a reference for others. So, I built it, and made it available here:

FreeBSD Operating System Cross Reference

Feel free to use it as much as you like.

In a future entry, I may show the steps and changes I made to get it all running, if there’s enough interest.

What’s next? We all know about devfs and similar file systems, and many of us use unionfs or nullfs. However – what other utility file systems would be useful, that we haven’t built yet? I think tools like FUSE have given a lot of people some very creative ways of thinking about file systems, but how can that be extended into other areas?