Re: procfs problems
Dan Hollis (goemon@sasami.anime.net)
Tue, 15 Apr 1997 12:38:27 -0700 (PDT)
On Tue, 15 Apr 1997 david@AeroSpace.miango.com wrote:
> On 15 Apr 1997, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> > > Those of you interested in discussing design flaws with the current procfs
> > > filesystem, take a look at
> > > http://www.anime.net/~goemon/procfs.html
> > > I invite comments.
> In regards to the "excuse", the data ifconfig uses has changed, so if it
> gets fixed "right" I don't see why we can't just do it.
>
> About the differences in /proc/{modules,locks,pci} I don't see how you
> could format then all the same. I mean modules has three columns first
> and third are variable sizes, locks has 13 columns each followed by a 3
> column row and pci, well, it doesn't begin to fit in any column/row scheme.
> I would think similar data should have the same format, but
> /proc/{modules,locks,pci} doesn't qualify in my book.
Look at /proc/stat for an example of how /proc/modules and
/proc/locks could be formatted.
Looking at /proc/pci, it got me to thinking about kernel bloat :-) If we
were to take all the text out of pci.c and put it in an external program
(call it "pciconfig" or "lspci") and have /proc/pci just output hex
numbers, we could save several kilobytes off the size of the kernel. It
would also probably be easier for programs to parse /proc/pci if they
needed configuration information.
-Dan