Re: An alternative way of populating /proc

From: Borislav Deianov (borislav@lix.polytechnique.fr)
Date: Fri Apr 14 2000 - 05:39:28 EST


In article <20000414005339.B4142@lrc.di.epfl.ch> you wrote:
> [ Cc list trimmed ]
[ Cc list lost, one of the disadvantages of reading through a news gateway ]

> almost static data. /proc currently does a good job at pretending the
> problem doesn't exist, because it can provide at least intra-record
> consistency.

Not even that if the record is larger than 3K.

> - locking: a request can acquire a lock while working on the variables

This seems to be always necessary if you want to provide consistent
data.

> - caching: ditto, but data is cached instead, changing the type of
> possible DoS attack

This too, unless you require user space to always provide a big enough
buffer that can fit all the data in a single read request.

> - versioning: /proc/bla/bla/version yields a string that changes whenever
> one of the variables in (atomic access domain) /proc/bla/bla changes

Sounds impractical as a generic scheme - modifying the version strings
for fast changing variables will be costly.

> I don't particularly like any of the two time-bomb approaches. In order
> to avoid the most obvious DoS problems, locking would probably need a way
> to "chain" reads, such that the kernel never has to wait for user space
> to release a lock. Caching could do the same, or just limit the
> per-process amount of such cached data.

What do you mean by "chaining" here?

Regards,
Borislav

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