/proc/$pid/mem

[Richard Fuchs <richard.fuchs@inode.info>]

Aloha!

I know it has been discussed before, but I must express my feelings 
about this issue nonetheless. I find it a major pain in the back that 
/proc/$pid/mem isn't readable by an unrelated process without doing a 
PTRACE_ATTACH first.

I mainly want to ask: is there a good reason to not drop this restriction?

I can read all the machine's physical memory and all of the kernel's 
address space (/dev/mem, /proc/kcore) non-intrusively, but I can't do 
the same on a single process. It seems to me that /proc/$pid/mem should 
work analogous to /dev/mem or /proc/kcore, but currently in practice it 
doesn't, and I don't see a good reason why it is supposed to be that way.

Cheers
Richard