Re: Requesting for review of the Draft proposal for - procfs

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 11:29:10PM +0100, Carl Fredrik Hammar wrote:
> "Madhusudan C.S" <madhusudancs@gmail.com> writes:

> > The project thus aims at making the GNU/Linux process management
> > tools like ps, top, vmstat, sysctl, w, kill, skill, nice, snice,
> > pgrep, free, tload, uptime, fuser, killall, pidof, pstree, etc., to
> > run out of the box.
> 
> Some of these items might already have a port that is good enough. Not
> sure which ones though, but probably kill.

Indeed, we have private implementations of ps, vmstat, uptime, w. vmstat
is rather system-specific I believe, so a private implementation makes
sense.

w and uptime probably could be replaced, but there is really no need for
it, as the existing Hurd ones work well.

I'm not sure what to do about ps. Our implementation is not fully
compatible with the Linux one, which means that sometimes programs
require porting; but that doesn't happen too often. Our implementation
is very badly documented and quite incomplete, though -- I had to read
the source and do quite some experimentation until I found the options I
needed...

On the other hand, the Hurd ps has some important Hurd-specific
features, so just replacing it with the Linux one is not really an
option either. And relying on procps for such basic tools seems
problematic anyways.

nice is part of GNU coreutils BTW, and has no relation to procfs...

kill is from procps on GNU/Linux, but there is also a portable version
in coreutils, which is the one we use on Hurd.

> Wow, 50 hours a week is a lot.  I didn't put nearly as much time into
> my GSoC project, I think 20 hours a week is typical for a GSoCer.

Well, GSoC is supposed to be the student's main occupation during the
summer. In my understanding, that means it should be treated like an
ordinary full-time job -- typically 35-40 hours per week in Europe...

Of course, there is some flexibility; but it shouldn't be much less than
that IMHO :-)

-antrik-