My gated monitor holds the file open continually.
> which implies a discrete point in time, but rather a fuzzy
> image of the kernel state over a period of time. How useful can
> this be?
All the tools like ps have lived with that since day 1.
> Today's systems have much more RAM than in the past. Hacks like
> this should be elimnated now that the majority of systems have
> the resources to do "the right thing." (TM)
Thats how you get 64Mb OS kernels.
> If this is really an issue, implimenting backwards compatibilty
> for memory critical proc routines is trivial.
Its not even neccessarily compatibility thats an issue. We just need
a way to say 'Dont cache me Im potentially big', or for the code to
get a 32K block and then say "Stuff this Im not caching any more".
Having a common interface to all the small /proc stuff is very good.
Alan