From owner-freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Jul 9 04:40:38 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7F94437B401 for ; Wed, 9 Jul 2003 04:40:38 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mailgate5.cinetic.de (mailgate5.cinetic.de [217.72.192.165]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 53AA743FBD for ; Wed, 9 Jul 2003 04:40:37 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from vivenzio@web.de) Received: from web.de (fmomail01.dlan.cinetic.de [172.20.1.45]) SMTP id h69BeZQ12876 for freebsd-doc@freebsd.org; Wed, 9 Jul 2003 13:40:35 +0200 Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 13:40:35 +0200 Message-Id: <200307091140.h69BeZQ12876@mailgate5.cinetic.de> MIME-Version: 1.0 Organization: http://freemail.web.de/ From: "Vivenzio Pagliari" To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Precedence: fm-user Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: kvm_openfiles(3) manual page and procfs X-BeenThere: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 List-Id: Documentation project List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 11:40:38 -0000 Hello! I'm quite new to FreeBSD. Coming from Linux, now and then I look at the differences between the systems and so I was curious, how information about processes is queried (eg. by the ps program). First I read somewhere (unfortunately I cannot remember where), that procfs is deprecated for getting information from and should not be used because it is not secure. My question here is: Is this statement correct and if yes, why isn't procfs secure? (This question is somewhat off-topic for freebsd-doc, but maybe someone can tell me ?!) Looking at some documentation and the sources of the ps program, I've realized that the kvm_* familiy of functions serves this purpose in FreeBSD. In the ps source, I've noticed, that "/dev/null" is used for the first two parameters of kvm_openfiles (the execfile and corefile arguments). But this is not documented in the man page, which rather suggests to use NULL or a kernel image as execfile and /dev/mem or dev/kmem or NULL for corefile. Shoudn't the usage of "/dev/null" be documented as well? Vivenzio ____________________________________________________________________________ Nur bei WEB.DE Testsieger FreeMail testen und damit 1 qm Regenwald schuetzen. Jetzt anmelden und mithelfen! http://user.web.de/Regenwald