Communications - October 2008

sive and manually turn on certain features in the Doxyfile, which is Doxygen’s configuration file. These features are listed in Table 2.

The option “HAVE_DOT” is the most important one because it’s what allows Doxygen to generate the most useful output for the code spelunker, including class, collaboration, call, and caller graphs. We’ll now take a brief look at two of these types of graphs. The code that we’re analyzing in this article is the TCP/IP stack of the FreeBSD Operating System. The BSD TCP/IP stack has been studied in the past¹² and continues to be studied by researchers working on the TCP/IP protocol suite.

For our examples we will look at a single function, ip _ output(), which is called in various parts of the network

figure 1. caller graph for ip_output().

stack in order to send an IP datagram to the network. The ip _ output() function is quite important to the stack because all normal packet transmissions flow through it. If a bug was found in this function, or if the API needed to be changed for some reason, it would be important to trace back all of the current users (callers) of the function. In Figure 1 we see the caller graph produced by Doxygen for ip _ output().

In Figure 1 we see that no fewer than 16 separate routines, in nearly as many modules, depend on the ip _ output() function. To effect a fix or update the API all of these routines will need to be investigated. The red-bordered boxes in Figure 1 show nodes that had a greater number of incoming edges than could be shown comfort-

ably in the graph, which is a good indication that the function contained therein is an important component of the system.

The opposite of a caller graph is a call graph. A call graph is more familiar to users of the tools mentioned previously, such as Cscope and global, which allow the user to interactively move through the call graph of a function, jumping into and out of underlying functions while browsing the source code. Doxygen gives us a different way of interacting with the call graph. Figure 2 shows the call graph for the ip _ output() function.

The call graph, like the caller graph, gives us a good visual overview of how the function fits into the overall system. Both of these figures function as maps