Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2011 18:35:02 -0800 From: Julian Elischer <julian@freebsd.org> To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org, kellydeanch@yahoo.com Cc: Oliver Fromme <olli@lurza.secnetix.de> Subject: Re: Why is procfs deprecated in favor of procstat? Message-ID: <4D65C3D6.9060205@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <201102211707.p1LH7c8n075660@lurza.secnetix.de> References: <201102211707.p1LH7c8n075660@lurza.secnetix.de>
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On 2/21/11 9:07 AM, Oliver Fromme wrote: > Kelly Dean<kellydeanch@yahoo.com> wrote: > > http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd8.html says that > > procfs is deprecated in favor of procstat. But Plan 9 says > > that procfs is the right way to do things. > > Linux says the same. But it's irrelevant what they say. > FreeBSD is not Plan 9, and FreeBSD is not Linux. > > Procfs has a long history of security vulnerabilities and > other problems. I do not mount procfs on most machines > I'm responsible for, especially not on machines that have > user accounts or services that are not restricted to jails. > > I also think it is inefficient to let the kernel render > data to ASCII, and then have userland tools parse that > ASCII data again. That's ridiculous. I disagree. It was ridiculous when pdp-11s had 500,000 instructions per second but there are many cases to day where it is not ridiculous. I don't think that procfs is by definition bad, and I am no really sure where this "edict" has come from. At fusion-io we have abstracted the control stuff to export as sysctl when compiled in the freebsd driver and procfs in the linux driver. While sysctl is 'ok' I will admit that the procfs variant is a bit more convenient to use. simply because you can enumerate the damned tree without seeing all the contents. > There is no sane > reason for putting kernel data as ASCII text into a pseudo > file system. > > Best regards > Oliver >
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