Re: [proc.txt] Fix /proc/pid/statm documentation

William Lee Irwin III
2004-08-06T12:11:28Z

On Fri, Aug 06, 2004 at 02:01:23PM +0200, Roger Luethi wrote:
> Your call, obviously -- do you think it's worthwhile? I didn't CC you
> on my initial posting because I wanted to avoid the impression that I am
> trying to make this your problem somehow. Priorities as I see them are:
> - Document statm content somewhere. I posted a patch to document
> the current state. It could be complemented with a description of
> what it is supposed to do.
> - Come to some agreement on what the proper values should be and
> change kernels accordingly. I'm inclined to favor keeping the first two
> (albeit redundant) fields and setting the rest to 0, simply because for
> them too many different de-facto semantics live in exisiting kernels.
> A year ago, the first field was broken in 2.4 as well (not sure if/when
> it got fixed), but I can see why it is useful to keep around until top
> has found a better source. Same for the second field, the only one that
> has always been correct AFAIK.

Some of the 2.4 semantics just don't make sense. I would not find it
difficult to explain what I believe correct semantics to be in a written
document.

The largest barrier is that the accounting has a large code impact.

On Fri, Aug 06, 2004 at 02:01:23PM +0200, Roger Luethi wrote:
> - Provide additional information in proc files other than statm.
> The problems with undocumented records are evident, but
> /proc/pid/status may be getting too heavy for frequent parsing. It's
> not realistic to redesign proc at this point, but it would be nice
> to have some documented understanding about the direction of proc
> evolution.

It will likely be easier to merge improvements of /proc/$PID/status as
the operations there are far less frequent and the accounting less
invasive.

-- wli