Top behavior differences

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2006-09-10 18:04, stan <stanb at panix.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 10, 2006 at 11:57:05AM -0400, Bob Hall wrote:
> > On Sun, Sep 10, 2006 at 08:56:31AM -0400, stan wrote:
> > > Can someone explain to me why top's handling of multi processor
> > > status display is different on FreeBSD, than it is on Linux?
> > 
> > Open source started with the concept of individuals hacking the source
> > code to get the features they want. The commericial ideal of users paying
> > for features they want was replaced by the ideal of users doing the work
> > to create the features they want. Open source has evolved into the
> > concept of many users getting a free ride as a relatively small number
> > of open source programmers do the work for them, without pay. 
> > 
> > Possible reasons why open source software X doesn't have feature Y:
> > 
>  -- Long discussion of open source philosophy dleted ---
> 
> Once upon a time, when people posted on lists like this, they got 
> well reasoned technical answers.
> 
> The question I was really asking, is if there is a technical
> reason for this difference (eg difernt sturctures for obatining
> the information in the 2 OS's). The reason that i feel this is
> an apropriate place to ask such a question, is that top is NOT 
> a port, but is provided by the base OS in FreeBSD.

There are technical reasons.  The top(1) utility peeks into kernel
structures, such as process lists, memory usage information and other
stuff, and our current FreeBSD version has been changed, fixed and
augmented with new features as FreeBSD was developed.  I doubt that it
can run unmodified on Linux.

What sort of technical details are you interested in?  I've made some
changes to top(1) myself, so maybe I can tell you what the differences
are if you have something specific in mind :)

- Giorgos