Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 4 Nov 2001 16:33:54 +0100 | From | Jakob Østergaard <> | Subject | PROPOSAL: dot-proc interface [was: /proc stuff] |
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Here's my stab at the problems - please comment,
We want to avoid these problems: 1) It is hard to parse (some) /proc files from userspace 2) As /proc files change, parsers must be changed in userspace
Still, we want to keep on offering 3) Human readable /proc files with some amount of pretty-printing 4) A /proc fs that can be changed as the kernel needs those changes
Taking care of (3) and (4):
Maintaining the current /proc files is very simple, and it offers the system administrator a lot of functionality that isn't reasonable to take away now.
* They should stay in a form close to the current one *
Taking care of (1) and (2):
For each file "f" in /proc, there will be a ".f" file which is a machine-readable version of "f", with the difference that it may contain extra information that one may not want to present to the user in "f".
The dot-proc file is basically a binary encoding of Lisp (or XML), e.g. it is a list of elements, wherein an element can itself be a list (or a character string, or a host-native numeric type. Thus, (key,value) pairs and lists thereof are possible, as well as tree structures etc.
All data types are stored in the architecture-native format, and a simple library should be sufficient to parse any dot-proc file.
So, we need a small change in procfs that does not in any way break compatibility - and we need a few lines of C under LGPL to interface with it.
Tell me what you think - It is possible that I could do this (or something close) in the near future, unless someone shows me the problem with the approach.
Thank you,
-- ................................................................ : jakob@unthought.net : And I see the elder races, : :.........................: putrid forms of man : : Jakob Østergaard : See him rise and claim the earth, : : OZ9ABN : his downfall is at hand. : :.........................:............{Konkhra}...............: - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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