Linux style /proc filesystem translator

[Jon Arney]

Hi all,

I've been busy the last week or so putting together a first pass at
a Linux style /proc filesystem translator.  It seems to have barely
enough smarts in it now to support the 'procps' package (not that
procps is better than the native Hurd utilities).  The intent here
was to start with a Linux-2.4 style /proc filesystem and then move
on to bigger and better by supporting a 'native' Hurd mode /proc
filesystem which models the Hurd's behavior better rather than
just emulating a Linux style /proc.  i.e. rather
than /proc/<pid>/* we might have /proc/tasks/<pid>/<thread>/*
and /proc/tasks/<pid>/<children>/* and other cool stuff.  
It would also be possible for /proc to only show processes owned
or grouped by you so that you can't see other users processes.

The biggest problem with the Linux-2.4 /proc filesystem emulation
is that many of the things available under Linux's /proc filesystem
either have no equivalent under the Hurd, or are not redily
available through existing data structures/RPCs because it's a
fundamentally different architecture.

If anyone's interested, I've put it out at
http://orac.ensor.org:8080/hurd/hurd-procfs/
with some documentation on what it is, what it does, etc.
Let me know if you can't get to it because I've had problems
from time to time with the network.

The beauty (and danter) of the Hurd is that it's an entirely
independent package and doesn't need to be compiled into the
/hurd tree.  It supports the traditional
automake;autoconf;./configure;make scheme.

Once built, you should be able to try it out using:

$ settrans /proc /hurd/procfs
$ ls /proc
$ cat /proc/1/cmdline
$ cat /proc/1/status
$ cat /proc/partitions
...and so on...

Man, this is fun!
-- 
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Jonathan S. Arney
Software Engineer
jarney1@cox.net
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