On Mon, 22 Jun 1998 22:55:15 -0400 (EDT) 
 woods@most.weird.com (Greg A. Woods) wrote:

 > Only /proc/meminfo is truely horrible.  Some others have headers that
 > shouldn't exist.  /proc/cpuinfo is easy to internationalize (i.e. to
 > convert to a format that doesn't use explicit English words in places
 > that non-English speakers might not appreciate).

What about their netstat "file"?

 > The concept of /proc and /kern are *incredibly* elegant and unix-like
 > and I'm seriously dismayed that NetBSD hasn't moved more directly to
 > making them integral parts of the system with an eye to totally
 > eliminating the need for kernel grubbing through /dev/kmem et al and the
 > unsolvable user-land incompatability problems such ancient hacks have
 > perpetuated.

So... this seems to come up often enough that it should be a FAQ,
but here it goes:

	1.  You have to keep the kmem parts of the programs around so you
	    can debug crash dumps.  This is irrelevant for Linux, since they
	    don't even HAVE crash dumps.

	2.  If the data from the /proc/... files is binary, you still have
	    structure version skew problem that kmem has.

	3.  If the data is string format, you have the problem that you're
	    forcing the data to be represented in a certain way, and
	    you can't easily change it.  (If you want to represent differently,
	    then you have to parse strings, which is slow and has the same
	    version skew problem that binary data does!)

Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
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