Subject: oddness

From: Rory Hunter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:50:58 +0100

hi,

I noticed yesteday that it appears that a partition has been set aside
by the previous owners of my O2 for /proc... assuming that 'df' isn't
lying to me, can anyone think of a reason why an 800Mb partition would
be set aside for /proc?

Cheers,

Rory Hunter

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From: Alistair Lambie <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 11:11:12 +1200

> lying to me, can anyone think of a reason why an 800Mb partition would

No, this is not really a partition.  See the man page for proc(4).  It
provides an image of each active process on the system.  It does not
consume any disk resources.

Cheers, Alistair 

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From: "William J. Earl" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 16:16:42 -0700 (PDT)

> lying to me, can anyone think of a reason why an 800Mb partition would

     As on Linux, /proc is not a real file system.  On IRIX, the size
of /proc is roughly the maximum amount of virtual space available (including
swap space), and the space used is the amount of virtual space in use.

---

From: Eric Kimminau <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:50:41 -0400

> lying to me, can anyone think of a reason why an 800Mb partition would

proc is your process table - it isn't taking file system space.
pretent it doesnt exist. Ignore it. Its "kernel stuff"

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From: Rory Hunter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 08:16:24 +0100

Hi,

I know the proc is virtual, but it puzzled me that 'df' should list it
when linux doesn't... if I can confirm that the partition itself is
virtual then I'll happliy ignore it.

Cheers,

Rory Hunter

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From: [email-masked] (Steven G. Parker)
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 01:29:02 -0600

>From the df man page:
     The proc filesystem (normally mounted under /proc) is not printed by
     default, but can be explicitly specified.  This filesystem consumes no
     actual disk space, but is an interface to the virtual space of running
     processes.  The total and free blocks reported represent the total
     virtual memory (real memory plus swap space) present and the amount
     currently free, respectively.

You will see /proc if you use GNU df.  Otherwise, you have to explicitly
ask for it (df /prof).

If you use IRIX df /proc, you will see that the Type is proc - a
virtual filesystem.

If you want to independently verify it - use prtvtoc to look at
how your disk is partitioned.  You will probably not see a /proc
paritition.

Steve Parker

On Sep 23,  8:16am, Rory Hunter wrote:
> Subject: Re: oddness
>-- End of excerpt from Rory Hunter

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From: Matt Robinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 05:19:51 -0700 (PDT)

On Thu, 23 Sep 1999, Rory Hunter wrote:
|>Hi,
|>
|>I know the proc is virtual, but it puzzled me that 'df' should list it
|>when linux doesn't... if I can confirm that the partition itself is
|>virtual then I'll happliy ignore it.

If you check out the manual pages for proc(4) under IRIX and proc(5)
under Linux (RedHat 6.0), you'll note that the filesystems are two
different things.  They are not the same.

/proc under IRIX reports process information.  /proc under Linux is
for displaying (and modifying) kernel tunables.

The proc(4) manual page under IRIX specifically states:

     The statfs(2) system call will return valid information concerning the
     proc filesystem.  The total and free blocks as reported by df(1)
     respectively represent the total virtual memory (real memory plus swap
     space) available and currently free.

Since the two filesystems perform different functions, 'df' should not
be expected to perform the same function.

Hope this helps.

--Matt

|>Cheers,
|>
|>Rory Hunter