freebsd-dev/sys/miscfs/procfs
David Greenman 24a1cce34f NOTE: libkvm, w, ps, 'top', and any other utility which depends on struct
proc or any VM system structure will have to be rebuilt!!!

Much needed overhaul of the VM system. Included in this first round of
changes:

1) Improved pager interfaces: init, alloc, dealloc, getpages, putpages,
   haspage, and sync operations are supported. The haspage interface now
   provides information about clusterability. All pager routines now take
   struct vm_object's instead of "pagers".

2) Improved data structures. In the previous paradigm, there is constant
   confusion caused by pagers being both a data structure ("allocate a
   pager") and a collection of routines. The idea of a pager structure has
   escentially been eliminated. Objects now have types, and this type is
   used to index the appropriate pager. In most cases, items in the pager
   structure were duplicated in the object data structure and thus were
   unnecessary. In the few cases that remained, a un_pager structure union
   was created in the object to contain these items.

3) Because of the cleanup of #1 & #2, a lot of unnecessary layering can now
   be removed. For instance, vm_object_enter(), vm_object_lookup(),
   vm_object_remove(), and the associated object hash list were some of the
   things that were removed.

4) simple_lock's removed. Discussion with several people reveals that the
   SMP locking primitives used in the VM system aren't likely the mechanism
   that we'll be adopting. Even if it were, the locking that was in the code
   was very inadequate and would have to be mostly re-done anyway. The
   locking in a uni-processor kernel was a no-op but went a long way toward
   making the code difficult to read and debug.

5) Places that attempted to kludge-up the fact that we don't have kernel
   thread support have been fixed to reflect the reality that we are really
   dealing with processes, not threads. The VM system didn't have complete
   thread support, so the comments and mis-named routines were just wrong.
   We now use tsleep and wakeup directly in the lock routines, for instance.

6) Where appropriate, the pagers have been improved, especially in the
   pager_alloc routines. Most of the pager_allocs have been rewritten and
   are now faster and easier to maintain.

7) The pagedaemon pageout clustering algorithm has been rewritten and
   now tries harder to output an even number of pages before and after
   the requested page. This is sort of the reverse of the ideal pagein
   algorithm and should provide better overall performance.

8) Unnecessary (incorrect) casts to caddr_t in calls to tsleep & wakeup
   have been removed. Some other unnecessary casts have also been removed.

9) Some almost useless debugging code removed.

10) Terminology of shadow objects vs. backing objects straightened out.
    The fact that the vm_object data structure escentially had this
    backwards really confused things. The use of "shadow" and "backing
    object" throughout the code is now internally consistent and correct
    in the Mach terminology.

11) Several minor bug fixes, including one in the vm daemon that caused
    0 RSS objects to not get purged as intended.

12) A "default pager" has now been created which cleans up the transition
    of objects to the "swap" type. The previous checks throughout the code
    for swp->pg_data != NULL were really ugly. This change also provides
    the rudiments for future backing of "anonymous" memory by something
    other than the swap pager (via the vnode pager, for example), and it
    allows the decision about which of these pagers to use to be made
    dynamically (although will need some additional decision code to do
    this, of course).

13) (dyson) MAP_COPY has been deprecated and the corresponding "copy
    object" code has been removed. MAP_COPY was undocumented and non-
    standard. It was furthermore broken in several ways which caused its
    behavior to degrade to MAP_PRIVATE. Binaries that use MAP_COPY will
    continue to work correctly, but via the slightly different semantics
    of MAP_PRIVATE.

14) (dyson) Sharing maps have been removed. It's marginal usefulness in a
    threads design can be worked around in other ways. Both #12 and #13
    were done to simplify the code and improve readability and maintain-
    ability. (As were most all of these changes)

TODO:

1) Rewrite most of the vnode pager to use VOP_GETPAGES/PUTPAGES. Doing
   this will reduce the vnode pager to a mere fraction of its current size.

2) Rewrite vm_fault and the swap/vnode pagers to use the clustering
   information provided by the new haspage pager interface. This will
   substantially reduce the overhead by eliminating a large number of
   VOP_BMAP() calls. The VOP_BMAP() filesystem interface should be
   improved to provide both a "behind" and "ahead" indication of
   contiguousness.

3) Implement the extended features of pager_haspage in swap_pager_haspage().
   It currently just says 0 pages ahead/behind.

4) Re-implement the swap device (swstrategy) in a more elegant way, perhaps
   via a much more general mechanism that could also be used for disk
   striping of regular filesystems.

5) Do something to improve the architecture of vm_object_collapse(). The
   fact that it makes calls into the swap pager and knows too much about
   how the swap pager operates really bothers me. It also doesn't allow
   for collapsing of non-swap pager objects ("unnamed" objects backed by
   other pagers).
1995-07-13 08:48:48 +00:00
..
procfs_ctl.c Add and move declarations to fix all of the warnings from `gcc -Wimplicit' 1995-03-16 18:17:34 +00:00
procfs_fpregs.c Added $Id$ 1994-08-02 07:55:43 +00:00
procfs_mem.c NOTE: libkvm, w, ps, 'top', and any other utility which depends on struct 1995-07-13 08:48:48 +00:00
procfs_note.c Added $Id$ 1994-08-02 07:55:43 +00:00
procfs_regs.c Added $Id$ 1994-08-02 07:55:43 +00:00
procfs_status.c Remove trailing whitespace. 1995-05-30 08:16:23 +00:00
procfs_subr.c Remove trailing whitespace. 1995-05-30 08:16:23 +00:00
procfs_vfsops.c Fixed panic that resulted from mmaping files in kernfs and procfs. A 1995-05-25 01:35:24 +00:00
procfs_vnops.c Remove trailing whitespace. 1995-05-30 08:16:23 +00:00
procfs.h Fixed panic that resulted from mmaping files in kernfs and procfs. A 1995-05-25 01:35:24 +00:00
README BSD 4.4 Lite Kernel Sources 1994-05-24 10:09:53 +00:00

saute procfs lyonnais

procfs supports two levels of directory.  the filesystem root
directory contains a representation of the system process table.
this consists of an entry for each active and zombie process, and
an additional entry "curproc" which always represents the process
making the lookup request.

each of the sub-directories contains several files.  these files
are used to control and interrogate processes.  the files implemented
are:

	file	- xxx.  the exec'ed file.

	status  - r/o.  returns process status.

	ctl	- w/o.  sends a control message to the process.
			for example:
				echo hup > /proc/curproc/note
			will send a SIGHUP to the shell.
			whereas
				echo attach > /proc/1293/ctl
			would set up process 1293 for debugging.
			see below for more details.

	mem	- r/w.  virtual memory image of the process.
			parts of the address space are readable
			only if they exist in the target process.
			a more reasonable alternative might be
			to return zero pages instead of an error.
			comments?

	note	- w/o.  writing a string here sends the
			equivalent note to the process.
			[ not implemented. ]

	notepg	- w/o.  the same as note, but sends to all
			members of the process group.
			[ not implemented. ]

	regs	- r/w.	process register set.  this can be read
			or written any time even if the process
			is not stopped.  since the bsd kernel
			is single-processor, this implementation
			will get the "right" register values.
			a multi-proc kernel would need to do some
			synchronisation.

this then looks like:

% ls -li /proc
total 0
   9 dr-xr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  0 Sep 21 15:06 0
  17 dr-xr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  0 Sep 21 15:06 1
  89 dr-xr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  0 Sep 21 15:06 10
  25 dr-xr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  0 Sep 21 15:06 2
2065 dr-xr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  0 Sep 21 15:06 257
2481 dr-xr-xr-x  2 jsp   staff  0 Sep 21 15:06 309
 265 dr-xr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  0 Sep 21 15:06 32
3129 dr-xr-xr-x  2 jsp   staff  0 Sep 21 15:06 390
3209 dr-xr-xr-x  2 jsp   staff  0 Sep 21 15:06 400
3217 dr-xr-xr-x  2 jsp   staff  0 Sep 21 15:06 401
3273 dr-xr-xr-x  2 jsp   staff  0 Sep 21 15:06 408
 393 dr-xr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  0 Sep 21 15:06 48
 409 dr-xr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  0 Sep 21 15:06 50
 465 dr-xr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  0 Sep 21 15:06 57
 481 dr-xr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  0 Sep 21 15:06 59
 537 dr-xr-xr-x  2 root  kmem   0 Sep 21 15:06 66
 545 dr-xr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  0 Sep 21 15:06 67
 657 dr-xr-xr-x  2 jsp   staff  0 Sep 21 15:06 81
 665 dr-xr-xr-x  2 jsp   staff  0 Sep 21 15:06 82
 673 dr-xr-xr-x  2 jsp   staff  0 Sep 21 15:06 83
 681 dr-xr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  0 Sep 21 15:06 84
3273 dr-xr-xr-x  2 jsp   staff  0 Sep 21 15:06 curproc
% ls -li /proc/curproc
total 408
3341 --w-------  1 jsp  staff       0 Sep 21 15:06 ctl
1554 -r-xr-xr-x  1 bin  bin     90112 Mar 29 04:52 file
3339 -rw-------  1 jsp  staff  118784 Sep 21 15:06 mem
3343 --w-------  1 jsp  staff       0 Sep 21 15:06 note
3344 --w-------  1 jsp  staff       0 Sep 21 15:06 notepg
3340 -rw-------  1 jsp  staff       0 Sep 21 15:06 regs
3342 -r--r--r--  1 jsp  staff       0 Sep 21 15:06 status
% df /proc/curproc /proc/curproc/file
Filesystem  512-blocks    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
proc                 2       2       0   100%    /proc
/dev/wd0a        16186   13548    1018    93%    /
% cat /proc/curproc/status
cat 446 439 400 81 12,0 ctty 748620684 270000 0 0 0 20000 nochan 11 20 20 20 0 21 117



the basic sequence of commands written to "ctl" would be

	attach		- this stops the target process and
			  arranges for the sending process
			  to become the debug control process
	wait		- wait for the target process to come to
			  a steady state ready for debugging.
	step		- single step, with no signal delivery.
	run		- continue running, with no signal delivery,
			  until next trap or breakpoint.
	<signame>	- deliver signal <signame> and continue running.
	detach		- continue execution of the target process
			  and remove it from control by the debug process

in a normal debugging environment, where the target is fork/exec'd by
the debugger, the debugger should fork and the child should stop itself
(with a self-inflicted SIGSTOP).  the parent should do a "wait" then an
"attach".  as before, the child will hit a breakpoint on the first
instruction in any newly exec'd image.

$Id: README,v 3.1 1993/12/15 09:40:17 jsp Exp $