porting an app that checks /proc/meminfo

[Fernan Aguero]

+----[ Brooks Davis <brooks at one-eyed-alien.net> (24.Jan.2006 23:06):
|
| On Tue, Jan 24, 2006 at 03:56:57PM -0200, Rainer Alves wrote:
| > Fernan Aguero wrote:
| > >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. 
| > >
| > ...
| > >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? 
| > 
| > Take a loot at sysutils/muse, which uses /dev/mem to gather this info:
| 
| Please don't do this.  Really!  There's no point in gratuitously
| groveling around in the kernel's live memory image to get data you have
| access to via unprivileged calls.
|
+----]

Brooks,

what are these unprivileged calls? can you list a few so we
can check the corresponding man pages? Are they BSD
specific?

Again I'm not versed in C so what follows is just what I
could grasp from a few google searches.

It seems like in linux you can also use unprivileged calls
to get this info, but you have also the option of using the
/proc filesystem. I don't know what are these unprivileged
calls like in linux ... but perhaps they are pretty standard
across systems?

I'm not positive about this but I just have the impression
that there should be a generic (not linux-specific or BSD
specific) way to get this info, like a generic call that has
the same name and similar arguments across different OS (of
course the internal implementation should be different in
each OS) ... does such thing exist?

Fernan