porting an app that checks /proc/meminfo

[Fernan Aguero]

Hi!

I've got a port ready for muscle

WWW: http://www.drive5.com/muscle/
Port: http://genoma.unsam.edu.ar/~fernan/freebsd/muscle.shar

The program builds fine, but because it uses /proc/meminfo
to check for available memory, when you run it, it will
complain about the lack of /proc/meminfo and won't let you
do anything. 

The author, has suggested a hack (see globalslinux.cpp
and patch-globalslinux.cpp in the port) that disables the
function that returns the amount of memory used by muscle
and the amount of RAM available in the computer. With this
patch muscle runs fine but i) the progress messages will
give incorrect values for current memory use & fraction of
available RAM and ii) muscle may fail to fail gracefully
when it runs out of memory, it may just crash.

I'm not a C programmer, and the author is not familiar with
BSD internals ... I'm trying to help by pointing him in the
right direction. So my question can be summarized as:

How does one gets the values of i) memory used by the
program/process and ii) amount of RAM available in the
computer without using /proc/meminfo in FreeBSD? 

Suggestion of places to look (man pages) and/or examples in
C are welcomed. The functions that need to be modified are
GetMemUseMB and GetRAMSizeMB in globalslinux.cpp. 

OTOH, I know we have linprocfs ... but AFAIK it will mount under 
/compat/linux/proc ... and given that the muscle executable
is FreeBSD native it will not check there ... am I right?

Thanks in advance,

Fernan