Access to kmem - System namelist - '

Henry Spencer henry at utzoo.UUCP
Sat Dec 8 10:43:49 AEST 1984


I hate to throw cold water on the widespread cries of joy, but I hope
everyone realizes that programs which "know" about the kernel tables --
however they gain access to them, /dev/kmem or whatever -- are hopelessly
unportable.  They may also be unreliable, due to race conditions.

It is indeed a blemish that there is no safe, implementation-independent
way of getting this information.  But it's not impossible to devise such
a thing, guys; has anyone bothered to try?  Bell Labs's "/proc" is a good
first step.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry



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