Re: [proc.txt] Fix /proc/pid/statm documentation

[William Lee Irwin III]

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.


-- wli
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