[nibbula]

I'm not a kernel hacker either, and even though a readfile system call might speed some things up, one of the reasons it's desired is really wallpapering over a deeper, much harder issue, that of it being a terrible hack to write the 'ps' command, and the more general issue of returning structured data from a unix-like kernel. Also it seems like a bad design not to know how big to make the buffer, which means if you want to reliably get the whole file you either have to put it in a loop reallocating the buffer, or do a stat system call before be lucky with the race condition.

To be fair, this has been an issue since the first unix kernels, and even though /proc and sysctl are an improvement over grepping kernel memory from user space (the incredibly hackish way old ps worked), in my opinion it's still a big mess in various ways.

Just in case you aren't aware, linux ps/top/etc. has to open possibly hundreds of fake files, parsing from text a bunch of stuff which may or may not be there or valid or the same data type depending on your kernel configuration or version. Just because you could write 'ps' with awk, doesn't make it good. I wouldn't object at all to the /proc interface, as a way of enabling simple tools, if there was also a decent function call interface.

Modern BSDs generally use sysctl, which although being better in theory, that you don't have the overhead of useless translating numbers back and forth from text and looking for space characters, it still has the problem that it's very dependent on subtle changes in the C data structures which can easily happen between version and architectures. But it also has the terrible drawback of not knowing how big the buffer should be and therefore having to be in an allocation fail loop, probably exactly when you don't want it to happen, when you system is overloaded with way too many processes. I really don't see why one couldn't pass a memory allocator function, which could be called in the same manner as a signal handler.

I don't know how windows stuff works inside, but to get process information you ask for a snapshot of the system from which you can return a set of handles to processes, which you can get information from. In other words, it allocates the appropriate things for you and has well defined set of information which you can query, all with a relatively simple function call interface from C. I wrote a 'ps' that works on linux/bsd/macos/windows, and even though I'm not at all fan of windows, the windows kernel does it better than all the unix kernels.

It's actually not that hard to make an acceptable C interface to to say process information, if you ignore the problems of data structure variance. But ignoring it is really the root of the issues, so it seems fairly pointless. sysctl sort of tries to have a metadata system, but it doesn't really address the data type problem well, and can end up using C structs from the kernel with same variance problems. For example task_struct in linux or struct proc on macos is kind of a big mess, but very important. You wouldn't want to restrict it from changing in any way, but you do want to get some of that data to users.

Making a good C metadata interface is complex, and although it's been done many times, it's quite tricky to do well, and you would really want a kernel interface to be done very well. I like to imagine that there could be something less bloated than gtk gobject, but more featurefull than sysctl. Unfortunately when I look at code involved I start feeling like C isn't really a good language for writing an operating system. But I still think that a well designed structured meta data system would be overall less overhead than /proc and could even achieve better speed and reliability.