Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Tue, 6 Nov 2001 20:10:01 -0500 (EST) | From | Ricky Beam <> | Subject | Re: PROPOSAL: /proc standards (was dot-proc interface [was: /proc |
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On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Martin Dalecki wrote: >And then converted back to ASCII for printout on the terminal ;-).
Well, they don't always get printf()'d...
>The second problem is that /proc is one of the few design "inventions" in >linux, which didn't get copied over from some other UNIX box and Linus >doesn't wan't recognize that this was A BAD DESIGN CHOICE.
/proc is a wonderful thing for what it was originally intended: access to the process table without looking at the tables in the kernel memory space (remember SunOS? what happened if /vmunix wasn't the running kernel?) Unfortunately, /proc has become the gheto of the Linux kernel. It is now the general dumping grounds for user/kernel interfacing. As a developer tool it's very handy; it's also very dangerous. Developers then resort to /proc as a perminant interface between kernel drivers and userland. (In the *BSD world, this is a kernfs, not a procfs.)
For an example of /proc done right, find a Solaris box. What do you find in /proc? Gee, process information. Only process information. In. Binary.
--Ricky
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