Re: [PATCH 0/4] Support for 'info proc' on FreeBSD cores and native

[John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org>]

On Tuesday, December 26, 2017 08:53:08 PM Simon Marchi wrote:
> On 2017-12-22 05:05 PM, John Baldwin wrote:
> > This series adds initial support for the 'info proc' command on
> > FreeBSD native processes and process cores.  FreeBSD generally does
> > not use the /proc filesystem, but instead exports data structures
> > containing process information either via kernel system control nodes
> > (for live processes), or in core dump notes.
> > 
> > My assumption is that the format of 'info proc' is expected to be
> > somewhat OS-specific though probably not gratuitously so.
> > 
> > For 'info proc mappings' I choose to include both mapping attributes
> > (such as permissions) along with the object file name.
> > 
> > I did choose to implement versions of 'info proc stat' and 'info proc
> > status' that are similar to the output on Linux for now.  However,
> > given that the output on FreeBSD is not tied to the output of files in
> > /proc and that having both 'stat' and 'status' with overlapping
> > content seems ambiguous, I do wonder if it wouldn't be better to just
> > have a single command that includes one copy of the information (and
> > perhaps treat 'stat' as an alias of 'status' on FreeBSD)?  I also
> > noticed in the document that there are older commands such as 'info
> > proc id' and 'info proc time' that if implemented would contain a
> > subset of the info in the 'stat' commands.  I would possibly prefer to
> > resurrect these commands on FreeBSD as subsets of 'stat/status'?  What
> > do you all think?
> > 
> > I do eventually plan on adding a 'info proc files' that outputs a
> > table of open file descriptors.
> > 
> > For the documentation I made minimal changes to the existing
> > documentation for 'info proc' to not state that it requires /proc, but
> > the wording could probably use improvement.  I have also not yet
> > documented that FreeBSD supports 'proc stat' and 'proc status' due to
> > the question above.
> 
> Hi John,
> 
> From reading the documentation, "info proc" seems to have been introduced
> specifically to print things from /proc.  I find it too bad however that
> the command line interface is based so closely on the /proc interface,
> since it brings all of its quirks with it (e.g. stat vs status).  Also,
> the important thing to the user is the information, regardless of where
> it comes from.
> 
> With your patch, it moves "info proc" a little bit from "printing /proc"
> to "print things about a process", which I think is totally fine.  I think
> you could change the doc to put even less emphasis on the fact that the info
> comes from /proc.

Ok, I'll try to update the documentation a bit more towards that vein.

> I'm fine with what you suggested above.

To be clear, which of these suggestions are you fine with?

1) Having a merged 'info proc stat/status' for FreeBSD.

2) Resurrecting 'info proc id' and 'info proc time'.

-- 
John Baldwin