Ricky Beam wrote:
> Ok, so when did the non-procfs interface for process data go away? (I'm
> assuming _years_ ago. There _were_ syscalls for it at one point.)
Nope, the state of the art back then was to poke around in /dev/kmem,
guided by a possibly obsolete symbol table, and blissfully ignorant of
any locking or such.
Whenever any of the kernel-internal tables changed, ps and friends
died a horrible death or started generating strangely incorrect
information, and there was a week of confusion in linux-kernel.
With the introduction of /proc, it became possible to write utilities
that didn't need to be updated twice a month. That's why we have a
decent collection of proc-related utilities now. (For the record, the
average release interval of psmisc is approximately half a year and
the last change for proc compatibility was in February '98. That much
about the oh so terribly fragile text files.)
I don't remember any system calls that disappeared because of /proc.
- Werner
-- _________________________________________________________________________ / Werner Almesberger, ICA, EPFL, CH werner.almesberger@ica.epfl.ch / /_IN_N_032__Tel_+41_21_693_6621__Fax_+41_21_693_6610_____________________/- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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