Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 08:34:29 -0500 (EST) From: Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org> To: Dhee Reddy <dhee@myrealbox.com> Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: No entries in /proc :: feature or problem ?? Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1021122083000.81249U-100000@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <87wun6ywdr.fsf@myrealbox.com>
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On 22 Nov 2002, Dhee Reddy wrote:
> Just tried to look up some info and saw that the /proc filesystem
> doesn't
> contain any files.
> Shouldn't they contain entries correcponding to all the processes
> ? truely -- dhee
In fresh 5.0 installs, procfs is not enabled by default. Right now there
appear to be two tools in the system that pay a price for this:
(1) procfs -e relies on grubbing through /proc/<pid>/mem to find
environmental variables -- everything else, it can get through
sysctl().
(2) truss currently relies on procfs, albeit not working very well. There
were a set of patches floating around to make truss use ptrace(),
which is the direction we probably do want to take this. If someone
could finish up that work, it would be great.
The reasons to deprecate procfs are many-fold -- not least that there are
existing interfaces in the kernel that provide most or all of its features
at a substantially lower risk. You just have to see the kernel-related
security advisories for FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, etc, over the last five
years to understand why we want to turn it off if we can. :-) There has
also been a concerted effort to move userland system monitoring tools away
from using /dev/kvm (direct kernel memory access) and towards using the
sysctl() MIB interface, reducing the level of privilege required to run
the monitoring tools.
Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert@fledge.watson.org Network Associates Laboratories
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