On Aug 4, 2014 3:22 PM, "Norman Wilson" <norman@oclsc.org> wrote:

<snip>
> Everything has gotten more complicated.  Some of the complexity
> involves reasonable tradeoffs (the move toward replacing binary
> interfaces with readable text where space and time are nowhere
> near critical, like the /proc and /sys trees in modern Linux).
<snip>

To digress from the main topic, I realize that's just one example, but here's a counterpoint to it:

We in Solaris designed /proc as a tool for developers to build innovative solutions, not an end-user interface. The Linux community believes that 'cat /proc/self/maps' is the best user interface, while we believe that pmap(1) is right answer. The reason for this is that mdb(1), truss(1), dtrace(1M) and a host of other tools all make use of this same information. It would be a waste of time to take binary information in the kernel, convert it to text, and then have the userland components all write their own (error prone) parsing routines to convert this information back into a custom binary form. Plus, we can change the options and output format of pmap without breaking other applications that depend on the contents of /proc.

[ https://blogs.oracle.com/eschrock/entry/the_power_of_proc]