Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 6 Aug 2004 05:11:18 -0700 | From | William Lee Irwin III <> | Subject | Re: [proc.txt] Fix /proc/pid/statm documentation |
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On Fri, Aug 06, 2004 at 02:01:23PM +0200, Roger Luethi wrote: > Your call, obviously -- do you think it's worthwhile? I didn't CC you > on my initial posting because I wanted to avoid the impression that I am > trying to make this your problem somehow. Priorities as I see them are: > - Document statm content somewhere. I posted a patch to document > the current state. It could be complemented with a description of > what it is supposed to do. > - Come to some agreement on what the proper values should be and > change kernels accordingly. I'm inclined to favor keeping the first two > (albeit redundant) fields and setting the rest to 0, simply because for > them too many different de-facto semantics live in exisiting kernels. > A year ago, the first field was broken in 2.4 as well (not sure if/when > it got fixed), but I can see why it is useful to keep around until top > has found a better source. Same for the second field, the only one that > has always been correct AFAIK.
Some of the 2.4 semantics just don't make sense. I would not find it difficult to explain what I believe correct semantics to be in a written document.
The largest barrier is that the accounting has a large code impact.
On Fri, Aug 06, 2004 at 02:01:23PM +0200, Roger Luethi wrote: > - Provide additional information in proc files other than statm. > The problems with undocumented records are evident, but > /proc/pid/status may be getting too heavy for frequent parsing. It's > not realistic to redesign proc at this point, but it would be nice > to have some documented understanding about the direction of proc > evolution.
It will likely be easier to merge improvements of /proc/$PID/status as the operations there are far less frequent and the accounting less invasive.
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