On Tue, 20 May 2003 13:05:15 PDT, "Luck, Tony" said:

> What about discontiguous memory.  Since /proc/kcore is super-user only
> we could continue with the attitude that the user should be careful not
> to touch memory that doesn't exist, or we could be kind and provide an
> API so that the architecture specific code that finds the memory can tell
> /proc/kcore what exists.

"don't touch memory that doesn't exist" is a bad idea unless there is *some*
sort of API that allows the program to intuit what does/doesn't exist.  If
the program can't find out what is legal without hitting an oops or worse,
nobody will use /proc/kcore, and then why bother implementing it?

(Note that I'd consider "look *here* for a pointer to known-existing memory,
then look 24 bytes into there for a pointer to a linked list of memory
block address/size pairs" sufficient, no need for a fancy /proc interface.
Of course, that's just my opinion - those who don't have memories of
pointer chasing in S/360 assembler under OS/MVT may have other opinions ;)