kvm_getfiles is badly broken

[Robert Watson]

On Mon, 31 Dec 2007, John Baldwin wrote:

> As long as fstat(1) still works on coredumps I'm happy. :)  Actually, it 
> looks like fstat(1) doesn't use sysctl at all, but always uses kvm, even on 
> live kernels.  It would probably be nice to provide a kvm_getfiles(3) that 
> exports 'struct xfile' objects by using the sysctl on live systems and by 
> simulating the syscall on crashdumps to generate 'struct xfile' objects. 
> You could then fix fstat(1) to use that instead of what it does now.  Note 
> that fstat(1) actually works now by walking each process' fdp table rather 
> than by walking the global filelist.

FWIW, I found the kernel export of file descriptor information via sysctl a 
bit sparse, so I implemented a more extended interface for procstat -f.  It 
could well be that fstat could be modified to use that interface and probably 
do quite a bit less work as a result.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge