26 Jun
2019
26 Jun
'19
6:56 a.m.
I have no informed opinion on Linux's /proc.
-rob
On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 10:46 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
I'm curious what Rob and others think of the
Linux /proc. It's string
based and it seems like it is more like /whatever_you_might_want.
The AT&T /proc that Faulkner worked on was much more narrow in scope,
in keeping with the Unix tradition. The linux /proc was both a way
to dig into kernel stuff and control kernel stuff, it was way broader.
On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 10:37:39AM +1000, Rob Pike wrote:
Peter Weinberger started and Tom Killian
finalized a version of /proc for
the eighth edition that is ioctl-driven. It was done in the early 1980s.
I
don't know where the idea originated.
In Plan 9, we (I?) replaced the ioctl interface, which was offensively
non-portable.
-rob
On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 10:01 AM ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 12:34 PM Norman Wilson <norman(a)oclsc.org>
wrote:
> >
> > It's interesting that this comment about ptrace was written
> > as early as 1980.
> >
> > Ron Minnich's reference to Plan 9 /proc misses the mark, though.
>
> your comment about my comment misses the mark; I was not talking about
> the origins of /proc. This is probably because I was not clear and
> probably because few people realize that the plan 9 process debugging
> interface was strings written and read to/from /proc/<pid>/[various
> files], rather than something like ptrace.
>
> The first time I saw that debug-interface-in-proc in plan 9, it made
> me think back to the 4.1c bsd manual ptrace comment, and I wondered if
> there was any path that led from this man page entry to the ideas in
> the plan 9 methods.
>
> I actually implemented the plan 9 debug model in linux back around
> 2007, but was pretty sure getting it upstream would never happen, so
> let it die.
>
> ron
>
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm