Subject: Re: Symbol lookups.
To: Andrew Brown <atatat@atatdot.net>
From: Greywolf <greywolf@starwolf.com>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 05/09/2003 12:59:15
Thus spake Andrew Brown ("AB> ") sometime Today...

AB> >Ok, nobody seems to have any special objections, so I will change the
AB> >kvm/nlist routines to use the /dev/ksyms interface instead, and retire
AB> >the old kvm.db stuff.
AB>
AB> even thought it had the nice side effect of providing a simple single
AB> place to look for kernel symbols?  perhaps kvm_mkdb should be changed
AB> to something that copies the kernel to a known place?  /dev/ksyms is
AB> still an option...

If I understand Ragge correctly, the kvm.db was rather slower than the
improved direct lookup code.  /dev/ksyms (or, failing that, kernel-nlist)
would be a preferable interface since we would then not _need_ to maintain
it in two separate places.  This is well evidenced in /etc/mtab vs. the
kernel mount table, and /etc/rmtab vs. the kernel export list.  I'm sure
if it were pertinent to kernel-specific information which needed to be
shared with userland, we'd have utmp in the kernel as well.  Part of me
still kind of wonders why utmp *isn't* there, but leave me alone -- I'll
figure it out :).

				--*greywolf;
--
NetBSD: Agnostics in the Platform Religious Wars.