Re: [Lse-tech] Re: A common layer for Accounting packages

Tim Schmielau
2005-02-23T09:54:15Z

On Tue, 22 Feb 2005, Andrew Morton wrote:

> We really want to avoid doing such stuff in-kernel if at all possible, of
> course.
>
> Is it not possible to implement the fork/exec/exit notifications to
> userspace so that a daemon can track the process relationships and perform
> aggregation based upon individual tasks' accounting? That's what one of
> the accounting systems is proposing doing, I believe.
>
> (In fact, why do we even need the notifications? /bin/ps can work this
> stuff out).

I had started a proof of concept implementation that could reconstruct the
whole process tree from userspace just from the BSD accounting currently
in the kernel (+ the conceptual bug-fix that I misnamed "[RFC] "biological
parent" pid"). This could do the whole job ID thing from userspace.
Unfortunately, I haven't had time to work on it recently.

Also, doing per-job accounting might actually be more lightweight than
per-process accounting, so I'm not at all opposed to unifying CSA and BSD
accounting into one mechanism that just writes different file formats.

A complete framework seems like overkill to me, too.

Tim