Subject: Re: Z50 kernel issues
To: Chris Jones <chris@cjones.org>
From: Greg Hughes <gl2hughes@uwaterloo.ca>
List: port-hpcmips
Date: 04/08/2002 14:06:41
I thought this might have had something to do with missing kernel
symbols at first (due to the error message that netstat / vmstat were
reporting -- kvm_syms... something), however the kernel I'm currently
running (and the one I posted yesterday) has been stripped and vmstat /
netstat work properly with it.

Needless to say, this still leaves me wondering what was wrong.

- Greg

On Mon, Apr 08, 2002 at 10:52:07AM -0600, Chris Jones wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 07, 2002 at 07:44:04PM -0400, Greg Hughes wrote:
> 
> > The kernel is smaller becuase I stripped it (removed debugging symbols)
> > before packaging it up.
> > 
> > I'm not sure why there's a problem with netstat/vmstat, but I'm also
> > experiencing the same issue here.
> 
> Netstat, vmstat, and a few other tools directly grovel through the
> kernel and its structures to get the data they need.  In order to do
> this, they need to find the locations of various global variables (aka
> symbols) in the kernel address space.  So, if you strip your kernel,
> you remove all those symbols, and netstat won't work.
> 
> I know there has been work in the direction of removing that sort of
> dependency.  For instance, ps used to work the same way, but it now
> uses sysctl, I believe.
> 
> Chris
> 
> -- 
> ---------------------------------------------------- chris@cjones.org
> Chris Jones                                          Mad scientist at large
>   www.netbsd.org www.postgresql.org www.schemers.org www.python.org