Access to kmem - System namelist - 'ps' etc
Joe Eykholt
jre at amdahl.UUCP
Tue Jan 15 13:41:14 AEST 1985
I know I'm coming into this discussion towards the end and I haven't
been keeping up with all the other proposals, but:
I think the method my predecesors at Amdahl chose to solve this problem
is rather clean. They added a special file that references the process
table memory, exactly like /dev/mem. Actually this file is just another
minor number for the /dev/mem driver.
A read from offset 0 in /dev/smem/proc reads from the start of the
process table.
Our modified ps doesn't require a namelist. If none is specified
it just opens /dev/smem/proc and reads process structures until it
gets an EOF.
While I agree that this feature isn't necessary, and that the cost of
every kernel enhancement should be carefully considered. I think it
would be nice to get away from programs which need to interpret the
namelist, and have to know a lot about the layout of the kernel.
Other special memory files we provided are: /dev/smem/file, inode,
stats (for sysinfo), text, and var.
--
Joe Eykholt ...{hplabs,ihnp4,amd,drivax,nsc,sun}!amdahl!jre
[Opinions expressed by me are not necessarily held by any other entity.]
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