Hacker News Reader

Comment by buredoranna | Hacker News Reader

Awhile back I put together a visualization of ext4.

https://buredoranna.github.io/linux/ext4/2020/01/09/ext4-viz...

Thanks. I really do miss the disk visualizations of the DOS and Norton Disk Doctor diagnostics and defragmenters from the old days. The one for the original Mac was pretty incredible due to high res graphics, even had color coded filetypes, etc if memory serves.

Linux never had a good one to my knowledge. Improved filesystems reduced the need and then SSDs delivered the deathblow.

But I feel like the visualization was useful in itself to see what was happening on the storage device and unfortunately forgotten due to those improvements.

>really do miss the disk visualizations of the DOS

Even Windows XP had a graphical representation of the disk contents, and it animated during defrag.

thats very cool. i feel like a long time ago we used to be able to cat /dev/hda1 > /dev/video ? but maybe im imagining things. i know you could do it with audio.

Yeah, it would work with /dev/dsp, the primary interface for audio IO in Open Sound System (OSS) -- the first media API for nx operating systems. Around the turn of the century it was replaced in the Linux kernel by the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA). Which, to this day, is still the "lowest level" high performance way to do audio w/ linux.

As for _visualizing_ the audio as video, no, that was never possible w/o writing code. =) And to do it _well_, you need to do some math as well. I say this because I wrote that code in 2001, 2003, then again in 2008, then again later... it's a ... hobby of mine :)

/dev/fb0, yes you could do that if you configured your system to use framebuffers.

This is fantastic.

Thanks for saying so :)

Agree, it's awesome.

It would be good to see example animated GIFs of current Windows-11-formatted FAT32 and NTFS volumes on the same-sized partitions.

Maybe even comparison to recent but unsupported OS like Windows 10 version from 2015, Windows 8, or Windows 7.

And see how closely the current or former mkfs in Linux compares when it is employed to create FAT32 or NTFS volumes on the same size partitions.

#keeper

Reply on news.ycombinator.com