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Cool, :) this is the first thing I tried as I saw the question: strace -o catcpuproc.txt cat /proc/cpuinfo

Ketan
– Ketan

2014-03-27 03:18:40 +00:00
Commented Mar 27, 2014 at 3:18
2

Nice answer! On linux, if you want to dig deeper, the source for the proc filesystem is in fs/proc in the kernel source. You'll see that there is a fs/proc/cpuinfo.c but, unfortunately, it is rather empty since the heavy lifting is spread out all over arch/ as it is architecture dependent. For a simpler example see fs/proc/uptime.c. By glancing at the file we can guess that uptime_proc_show is the workhorse of what gets us the data we want and we could explore it more by diving into the functions it calls. To understand the seq_file interface and how it is used in procfs see:

Steven D
– Steven D

2014-03-27 04:08:53 +00:00
Commented Mar 27, 2014 at 4:08
1

linux.com/learn/linux-training/… and lwn.net/Articles/22355 (a bit dated)

Steven D
– Steven D

2014-03-27 04:09:33 +00:00
Commented Mar 27, 2014 at 4:09
2

@slm : +1, great answer. But to me, the first hint it's a special file is its size ^^ 0 bytes, yet you can cat lots of things from it (a bit like some pipe files).

Olivier Dulac
– Olivier Dulac

2014-03-27 09:16:53 +00:00
Commented Mar 27, 2014 at 9:16
@OlivierDulac - good point. I've made additional edits based on your feedback. LMK if I can make any further improvements. Thanks.

slm
– slm ♦

2014-03-27 11:49:07 +00:00
Commented Mar 27, 2014 at 11:49

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