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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Question about /proc/acpi (Debian 7.2 w/ 3.2.0-4-686-pae kernel) Post 302881299 by bakunin on Friday 27th of December 2013 04:43:41 PM
Old 12-27-2013
Quote:
Originally Posted by gacanepa
In your opinion, am I missing anything?
Maybe...

Sit down, young one, while i tell you a story from the times of yore...

At first, there was UNIX ("UNICS", actually), and one absolutely new paradigma to this OS (and a prominent reason for its success) was the idea that everything is a file. UNIX does most of its workings in files: devices? There is a device file. Inter-process communication? There are named pipes and semaphores and FIFOs. Drivers? Interact with a pseudo device (file)! And so on, and so on.

Now, this was a very simple yet efficient and flexible design, but humans always seek to improve on even the best ideas and so a successor for UNIX was conceived by some of the people who built UNIX: it was called "Plan 9" and it took whatever was good in UNIX and tried to improve on it. One of these improvements was to take the idea of "everything is a file" one step further and do even process accounting in the filesystem: this was the invention of the /proc filesystem.

Well, sometimes even the best laid plans fall short and, sadly enough, this was the case with Plan 9 (from outer space) too - it never gained momentum and it never took off, let alone replaced UNIX. Still, many ideas from Plan 9 were good and have been built (Plan-9-developers would probably say "backported") into various UNIX flavours. The /proc filesystem was such an idea. It was built into the Linux kernel and since then most UNIX-derivates have - under the impression of the Linux success - also incorporated a /proc filesystem. My "home" OS, IBMs AIX, has it since version 5 (~2000). Also SunOS has it, but i don't know since when. I do not know enough about HP-Ux to know if there is a /proc filesystem or not.

I hope this story has enriched your understanding. I know, it will not answer any concrete questions of "how to ..." but i think knowing some historical dimensions of the things we deal with helps us doing better work in the long run.

bakunin
 

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SYSFS(2)                                                     Linux Programmer's Manual                                                    SYSFS(2)

NAME
sysfs - get filesystem type information SYNOPSIS
int sysfs(int option, const char *fsname); int sysfs(int option, unsigned int fs_index, char *buf); int sysfs(int option); DESCRIPTION
Note: if you are looking for information about the sysfs filesystem that is normally mounted at /sys, see sysfs(5). The (obsolete) sysfs() system call returns information about the filesystem types currently present in the kernel. The specific form of the sysfs() call and the information returned depends on the option in effect: 1 Translate the filesystem identifier string fsname into a filesystem type index. 2 Translate the filesystem type index fs_index into a null-terminated filesystem identifier string. This string will be written to the buffer pointed to by buf. Make sure that buf has enough space to accept the string. 3 Return the total number of filesystem types currently present in the kernel. The numbering of the filesystem type indexes begins with zero. RETURN VALUE
On success, sysfs() returns the filesystem index for option 1, zero for option 2, and the number of currently configured filesystems for option 3. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set appropriately. ERRORS
EFAULT Either fsname or buf is outside your accessible address space. EINVAL fsname is not a valid filesystem type identifier; fs_index is out-of-bounds; option is invalid. CONFORMING TO
SVr4. NOTES
This System-V derived system call is obsolete; don't use it. On systems with /proc, the same information can be obtained via /proc/filesystems; use that interface instead. BUGS
There is no libc or glibc support. There is no way to guess how large buf should be. COLOPHON
This page is part of release 4.15 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, information about reporting bugs, and the latest version of this page, can be found at https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/. Linux 2017-09-15 SYSFS(2)
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