Subj : Re: Pointless waste of time To : comp.programming.threads From : Joe Seigh Date : Tue Apr 19 2005 07:51 am On Tue, 19 Apr 2005 03:16:13 GMT, Randy Howard wrote: > In article , jseigh_01@xemaps.com says... >> Just wasted the day testing various api's to see what they actually do. >> It would be nice if they started documenting what these api's did. >> >> Learned some interesting things about Linux /proc. There's more there than >> meets the eye. Literally. It's still totally useless compared to Solaris >> or Aix, though. Somebody take a cluebat to Linux kernel developers, please. > > Care to enumerate the problems you encountered, or are we to guess? You mean was my post about as informative as some of the api man pages? :) If you want useless fun, try using any of the kernel thread ids for a process, the stuff the task directory, as a process id. E.g. if 5556 is in /proc/5555/task try "ls /proc/5556" even though you can't see a /proc/5556. For an example of badly documented and/or somewhat useless api's, here's one I didn't test yet. I wasn't paying too much attention to the ITIMER questions here at the time. The claim is you can use ITIMER to profile processes. But if signals go to only an enabled thread in a processes, not to all threads, then you probably can't profile a multi-threaded process on a multi-processor very well. The documentation doesn't explicitly address this issue. I'd have to waste a bunch of time to confirm this one way or another. You have to check these things out because once in a while it turns out some api will actually do something useful. Yesterday it was one out of three. -- Joe Seigh When you get lemons, you make lemonade. When you get hardware, you make software. .