That raises the question of how their ps, top, lsof and such work, since afaik in Linux they read from /proc.
P.S. Looks like BSDs tug at the kernel via syscalls, namely sysctl and also the ‘kvm interface’ in the case of MacOS (not sure what ‘kvm’ thing is meant here). Seems vaguely reasonable, since procfs also queries the kernel for the info, so about the same resources would be used, perhaps even with the overhead of filesystem traversal and string-numbers conversion.
Did you know openBSD does not have this folder? I think the BSD’s do not use /proc. I do not know why though.
That raises the question of how their
ps,top,lsofand such work, since afaik in Linux they read from /proc.P.S. Looks like BSDs tug at the kernel via syscalls, namely
sysctland also the ‘kvm interface’ in the case of MacOS (not sure what ‘kvm’ thing is meant here). Seems vaguely reasonable, since procfs also queries the kernel for the info, so about the same resources would be used, perhaps even with the overhead of filesystem traversal and string-numbers conversion.I might be mistaken, but I think kvm stands for kernel virtual machine. Having no /proc, and interacting with sysctl instead sounds more secure, IMO.