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1------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2 T H E /proc F I L E S Y S T E M
3------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4/proc/sys Terrehon Bowden <terrehon@pacbell.net> October 7 1999
5 Bodo Bauer <bb@ricochet.net>
6
72.4.x update Jorge Nerin <comandante@zaralinux.com> November 14 2000
8move /proc/sys Shen Feng <shen@cn.fujitsu.com> April 1 2009
9------------------------------------------------------------------------------
10Version 1.3 Kernel version 2.2.12
11 Kernel version 2.4.0-test11-pre4
12------------------------------------------------------------------------------
13fixes/update part 1.1 Stefani Seibold <stefani@seibold.net> June 9 2009
14
15Table of Contents
16-----------------
17
18 0 Preface
19 0.1 Introduction/Credits
20 0.2 Legal Stuff
21
22 1 Collecting System Information
23 1.1 Process-Specific Subdirectories
24 1.2 Kernel data
25 1.3 IDE devices in /proc/ide
26 1.4 Networking info in /proc/net
27 1.5 SCSI info
28 1.6 Parallel port info in /proc/parport
29 1.7 TTY info in /proc/tty
30 1.8 Miscellaneous kernel statistics in /proc/stat
31 1.9 Ext4 file system parameters
32
33 2 Modifying System Parameters
34
35 3 Per-Process Parameters
36 3.1 /proc/<pid>/oom_adj & /proc/<pid>/oom_score_adj - Adjust the oom-killer
37 score
38 3.2 /proc/<pid>/oom_score - Display current oom-killer score
39 3.3 /proc/<pid>/io - Display the IO accounting fields
40 3.4 /proc/<pid>/coredump_filter - Core dump filtering settings
41 3.5 /proc/<pid>/mountinfo - Information about mounts
42 3.6 /proc/<pid>/comm & /proc/<pid>/task/<tid>/comm
43 3.7 /proc/<pid>/task/<tid>/children - Information about task children
44 3.8 /proc/<pid>/fdinfo/<fd> - Information about opened file
45 3.9 /proc/<pid>/map_files - Information about memory mapped files
46 3.10 /proc/<pid>/timerslack_ns - Task timerslack value
47
48 4 Configuring procfs
49 4.1 Mount options
50
51------------------------------------------------------------------------------
52Preface
53------------------------------------------------------------------------------
54
550.1 Introduction/Credits
56------------------------
57
58This documentation is part of a soon (or so we hope) to be released book on
59the SuSE Linux distribution. As there is no complete documentation for the
60/proc file system and we've used many freely available sources to write these
61chapters, it seems only fair to give the work back to the Linux community.
62This work is based on the 2.2.* kernel version and the upcoming 2.4.*. I'm
63afraid it's still far from complete, but we hope it will be useful. As far as
64we know, it is the first 'all-in-one' document about the /proc file system. It
65is focused on the Intel x86 hardware, so if you are looking for PPC, ARM,
66SPARC, AXP, etc., features, you probably won't find what you are looking for.
67It also only covers IPv4 networking, not IPv6 nor other protocols - sorry. But
68additions and patches are welcome and will be added to this document if you
69mail them to Bodo.
70
71We'd like to thank Alan Cox, Rik van Riel, and Alexey Kuznetsov and a lot of
72other people for help compiling this documentation. We'd also like to extend a
73special thank you to Andi Kleen for documentation, which we relied on heavily
74to create this document, as well as the additional information he provided.
75Thanks to everybody else who contributed source or docs to the Linux kernel
76and helped create a great piece of software... :)
77
78If you have any comments, corrections or additions, please don't hesitate to
79contact Bodo Bauer at bb@ricochet.net. We'll be happy to add them to this
80document.
81
82The latest version of this document is available online at
83http://tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/proc.html
84
85If the above direction does not works for you, you could try the kernel
86mailing list at linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org and/or try to reach me at
87comandante@zaralinux.com.
88
890.2 Legal Stuff
90---------------
91
92We don't guarantee the correctness of this document, and if you come to us
93complaining about how you screwed up your system because of incorrect
94documentation, we won't feel responsible...
95
96------------------------------------------------------------------------------
97CHAPTER 1: COLLECTING SYSTEM INFORMATION
98------------------------------------------------------------------------------
99
100------------------------------------------------------------------------------
101In This Chapter
102------------------------------------------------------------------------------
103* Investigating the properties of the pseudo file system /proc and its
104 ability to provide information on the running Linux system
105* Examining /proc's structure
106* Uncovering various information about the kernel and the processes running
107 on the system
108------------------------------------------------------------------------------
109
110
111The proc file system acts as an interface to internal data structures in the
112kernel. It can be used to obtain information about the system and to change
113certain kernel parameters at runtime (sysctl).
114
115First, we'll take a look at the read-only parts of /proc. In Chapter 2, we
116show you how you can use /proc/sys to change settings.
117
1181.1 Process-Specific Subdirectories
119-----------------------------------
120
121The directory /proc contains (among other things) one subdirectory for each
122process running on the system, which is named after the process ID (PID).
123
124The link self points to the process reading the file system. Each process
125subdirectory has the entries listed in Table 1-1.
126
127
128Table 1-1: Process specific entries in /proc
129..............................................................................
130 File Content
131 clear_refs Clears page referenced bits shown in smaps output
132 cmdline Command line arguments
133 cpu Current and last cpu in which it was executed (2.4)(smp)
134 cwd Link to the current working directory
135 environ Values of environment variables
136 exe Link to the executable of this process
137 fd Directory, which contains all file descriptors
138 maps Memory maps to executables and library files (2.4)
139 mem Memory held by this process
140 root Link to the root directory of this process
141 stat Process status
142 statm Process memory status information
143 status Process status in human readable form
144 wchan Present with CONFIG_KALLSYMS=y: it shows the kernel function
145 symbol the task is blocked in - or "0" if not blocked.
146 pagemap Page table
147 stack Report full stack trace, enable via CONFIG_STACKTRACE
148 smaps an extension based on maps, showing the memory consumption of
149 each mapping and flags associated with it
150 numa_maps an extension based on maps, showing the memory locality and
151 binding policy as well as mem usage (in pages) of each mapping.
152..............................................................................
153
154For example, to get the status information of a process, all you have to do is
155read the file /proc/PID/status:
156
157 >cat /proc/self/status
158 Name: cat
159 State: R (running)
160 Tgid: 5452
161 Pid: 5452
162 PPid: 743
163 TracerPid: 0 (2.4)
164 Uid: 501 501 501 501
165 Gid: 100 100 100 100
166 FDSize: 256
167 Groups: 100 14 16
168 VmPeak: 5004 kB
169 VmSize: 5004 kB
170 VmLck: 0 kB
171 VmHWM: 476 kB
172 VmRSS: 476 kB
173 RssAnon: 352 kB
174 RssFile: 120 kB
175 RssShmem: 4 kB
176 VmData: 156 kB
177 VmStk: 88 kB
178 VmExe: 68 kB
179 VmLib: 1412 kB
180 VmPTE: 20 kb
181 VmSwap: 0 kB
182 HugetlbPages: 0 kB
183 Threads: 1
184 SigQ: 0/28578
185 SigPnd: 0000000000000000
186 ShdPnd: 0000000000000000
187 SigBlk: 0000000000000000
188 SigIgn: 0000000000000000
189 SigCgt: 0000000000000000
190 CapInh: 00000000fffffeff
191 CapPrm: 0000000000000000
192 CapEff: 0000000000000000
193 CapBnd: ffffffffffffffff
194 NoNewPrivs: 0
195 Seccomp: 0
196 voluntary_ctxt_switches: 0
197 nonvoluntary_ctxt_switches: 1
198
199This shows you nearly the same information you would get if you viewed it with
200the ps command. In fact, ps uses the proc file system to obtain its
201information. But you get a more detailed view of the process by reading the
202file /proc/PID/status. It fields are described in table 1-2.
203
204The statm file contains more detailed information about the process
205memory usage. Its seven fields are explained in Table 1-3. The stat file
206contains details information about the process itself. Its fields are
207explained in Table 1-4.
208
209(for SMP CONFIG users)
210For making accounting scalable, RSS related information are handled in an
211asynchronous manner and the value may not be very precise. To see a precise
212snapshot of a moment, you can see /proc/<pid>/smaps file and scan page table.
213It's slow but very precise.
214
215Table 1-2: Contents of the status files (as of 4.8)
216..............................................................................
217 Field Content
218 Name filename of the executable
219 Umask file mode creation mask
220 State state (R is running, S is sleeping, D is sleeping
221 in an uninterruptible wait, Z is zombie,
222 T is traced or stopped)
223 Tgid thread group ID
224 Ngid NUMA group ID (0 if none)
225 Pid process id
226 PPid process id of the parent process
227 TracerPid PID of process tracing this process (0 if not)
228 Uid Real, effective, saved set, and file system UIDs
229 Gid Real, effective, saved set, and file system GIDs
230 FDSize number of file descriptor slots currently allocated
231 Groups supplementary group list
232 NStgid descendant namespace thread group ID hierarchy
233 NSpid descendant namespace process ID hierarchy
234 NSpgid descendant namespace process group ID hierarchy
235 NSsid descendant namespace session ID hierarchy
236 VmPeak peak virtual memory size
237 VmSize total program size
238 VmLck locked memory size
239 VmPin pinned memory size
240 VmHWM peak resident set size ("high water mark")
241 VmRSS size of memory portions. It contains the three
242 following parts (VmRSS = RssAnon + RssFile + RssShmem)
243 RssAnon size of resident anonymous memory
244 RssFile size of resident file mappings
245 RssShmem size of resident shmem memory (includes SysV shm,
246 mapping of tmpfs and shared anonymous mappings)
247 VmData size of private data segments
248 VmStk size of stack segments
249 VmExe size of text segment
250 VmLib size of shared library code
251 VmPTE size of page table entries
252 VmPMD size of second level page tables
253 VmSwap amount of swap used by anonymous private data
254 (shmem swap usage is not included)
255 HugetlbPages size of hugetlb memory portions
256 Threads number of threads
257 SigQ number of signals queued/max. number for queue
258 SigPnd bitmap of pending signals for the thread
259 ShdPnd bitmap of shared pending signals for the process
260 SigBlk bitmap of blocked signals
261 SigIgn bitmap of ignored signals
262 SigCgt bitmap of caught signals
263 CapInh bitmap of inheritable capabilities
264 CapPrm bitmap of permitted capabilities
265 CapEff bitmap of effective capabilities
266 CapBnd bitmap of capabilities bounding set
267 NoNewPrivs no_new_privs, like prctl(PR_GET_NO_NEW_PRIV, ...)
268 Seccomp seccomp mode, like prctl(PR_GET_SECCOMP, ...)
269 Cpus_allowed mask of CPUs on which this process may run
270 Cpus_allowed_list Same as previous, but in "list format"
271 Mems_allowed mask of memory nodes allowed to this process
272 Mems_allowed_list Same as previous, but in "list format"
273 voluntary_ctxt_switches number of voluntary context switches
274 nonvoluntary_ctxt_switches number of non voluntary context switches
275..............................................................................
276
277Table 1-3: Contents of the statm files (as of 2.6.8-rc3)
278..............................................................................
279 Field Content
280 size total program size (pages) (same as VmSize in status)
281 resident size of memory portions (pages) (same as VmRSS in status)
282 shared number of pages that are shared (i.e. backed by a file, same
283 as RssFile+RssShmem in status)
284 trs number of pages that are 'code' (not including libs; broken,
285 includes data segment)
286 lrs number of pages of library (always 0 on 2.6)
287 drs number of pages of data/stack (including libs; broken,
288 includes library text)
289 dt number of dirty pages (always 0 on 2.6)
290..............................................................................
291
292
293Table 1-4: Contents of the stat files (as of 2.6.30-rc7)
294..............................................................................
295 Field Content
296 pid process id
297 tcomm filename of the executable
298 state state (R is running, S is sleeping, D is sleeping in an
299 uninterruptible wait, Z is zombie, T is traced or stopped)
300 ppid process id of the parent process
301 pgrp pgrp of the process
302 sid session id
303 tty_nr tty the process uses
304 tty_pgrp pgrp of the tty
305 flags task flags
306 min_flt number of minor faults
307 cmin_flt number of minor faults with child's
308 maj_flt number of major faults
309 cmaj_flt number of major faults with child's
310 utime user mode jiffies
311 stime kernel mode jiffies
312 cutime user mode jiffies with child's
313 cstime kernel mode jiffies with child's
314 priority priority level
315 nice nice level
316 num_threads number of threads
317 it_real_value (obsolete, always 0)
318 start_time time the process started after system boot
319 vsize virtual memory size
320 rss resident set memory size
321 rsslim current limit in bytes on the rss
322 start_code address above which program text can run
323 end_code address below which program text can run
324 start_stack address of the start of the main process stack
325 esp current value of ESP
326 eip current value of EIP
327 pending bitmap of pending signals
328 blocked bitmap of blocked signals
329 sigign bitmap of ignored signals
330 sigcatch bitmap of caught signals
331 0 (place holder, used to be the wchan address, use /proc/PID/wchan instead)
332 0 (place holder)
333 0 (place holder)
334 exit_signal signal to send to parent thread on exit
335 task_cpu which CPU the task is scheduled on
336 rt_priority realtime priority
337 policy scheduling policy (man sched_setscheduler)
338 blkio_ticks time spent waiting for block IO
339 gtime guest time of the task in jiffies
340 cgtime guest time of the task children in jiffies
341 start_data address above which program data+bss is placed
342 end_data address below which program data+bss is placed
343 start_brk address above which program heap can be expanded with brk()
344 arg_start address above which program command line is placed
345 arg_end address below which program command line is placed
346 env_start address above which program environment is placed
347 env_end address below which program environment is placed
348 exit_code the thread's exit_code in the form reported by the waitpid system call
349..............................................................................
350
351The /proc/PID/maps file containing the currently mapped memory regions and
352their access permissions.
353
354The format is:
355
356address perms offset dev inode pathname
357
35808048000-08049000 r-xp 00000000 03:00 8312 /opt/test
35908049000-0804a000 rw-p 00001000 03:00 8312 /opt/test
3600804a000-0806b000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 [heap]
361a7cb1000-a7cb2000 ---p 00000000 00:00 0
362a7cb2000-a7eb2000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
363a7eb2000-a7eb3000 ---p 00000000 00:00 0
364a7eb3000-a7ed5000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
365a7ed5000-a8008000 r-xp 00000000 03:00 4222 /lib/libc.so.6
366a8008000-a800a000 r--p 00133000 03:00 4222 /lib/libc.so.6
367a800a000-a800b000 rw-p 00135000 03:00 4222 /lib/libc.so.6
368a800b000-a800e000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
369a800e000-a8022000 r-xp 00000000 03:00 14462 /lib/libpthread.so.0
370a8022000-a8023000 r--p 00013000 03:00 14462 /lib/libpthread.so.0
371a8023000-a8024000 rw-p 00014000 03:00 14462 /lib/libpthread.so.0
372a8024000-a8027000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
373a8027000-a8043000 r-xp 00000000 03:00 8317 /lib/ld-linux.so.2
374a8043000-a8044000 r--p 0001b000 03:00 8317 /lib/ld-linux.so.2
375a8044000-a8045000 rw-p 0001c000 03:00 8317 /lib/ld-linux.so.2
376aff35000-aff4a000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 [stack]
377ffffe000-fffff000 r-xp 00000000 00:00 0 [vdso]
378
379where "address" is the address space in the process that it occupies, "perms"
380is a set of permissions:
381
382 r = read
383 w = write
384 x = execute
385 s = shared
386 p = private (copy on write)
387
388"offset" is the offset into the mapping, "dev" is the device (major:minor), and
389"inode" is the inode on that device. 0 indicates that no inode is associated
390with the memory region, as the case would be with BSS (uninitialized data).
391The "pathname" shows the name associated file for this mapping. If the mapping
392is not associated with a file:
393
394 [heap] = the heap of the program
395 [stack] = the stack of the main process
396 [vdso] = the "virtual dynamic shared object",
397 the kernel system call handler
398
399 or if empty, the mapping is anonymous.
400
401The /proc/PID/smaps is an extension based on maps, showing the memory
402consumption for each of the process's mappings. For each of mappings there
403is a series of lines such as the following:
404
40508048000-080bc000 r-xp 00000000 03:02 13130 /bin/bash
406Size: 1084 kB
407Rss: 892 kB
408Pss: 374 kB
409Shared_Clean: 892 kB
410Shared_Dirty: 0 kB
411Private_Clean: 0 kB
412Private_Dirty: 0 kB
413Referenced: 892 kB
414Anonymous: 0 kB
415AnonHugePages: 0 kB
416ShmemPmdMapped: 0 kB
417Shared_Hugetlb: 0 kB
418Private_Hugetlb: 0 kB
419Swap: 0 kB
420SwapPss: 0 kB
421KernelPageSize: 4 kB
422MMUPageSize: 4 kB
423Locked: 0 kB
424VmFlags: rd ex mr mw me dw
425
426the first of these lines shows the same information as is displayed for the
427mapping in /proc/PID/maps. The remaining lines show the size of the mapping
428(size), the amount of the mapping that is currently resident in RAM (RSS), the
429process' proportional share of this mapping (PSS), the number of clean and
430dirty private pages in the mapping.
431
432The "proportional set size" (PSS) of a process is the count of pages it has
433in memory, where each page is divided by the number of processes sharing it.
434So if a process has 1000 pages all to itself, and 1000 shared with one other
435process, its PSS will be 1500.
436Note that even a page which is part of a MAP_SHARED mapping, but has only
437a single pte mapped, i.e. is currently used by only one process, is accounted
438as private and not as shared.
439"Referenced" indicates the amount of memory currently marked as referenced or
440accessed.
441"Anonymous" shows the amount of memory that does not belong to any file. Even
442a mapping associated with a file may contain anonymous pages: when MAP_PRIVATE
443and a page is modified, the file page is replaced by a private anonymous copy.
444"AnonHugePages" shows the ammount of memory backed by transparent hugepage.
445"ShmemPmdMapped" shows the ammount of shared (shmem/tmpfs) memory backed by
446huge pages.
447"Shared_Hugetlb" and "Private_Hugetlb" show the ammounts of memory backed by
448hugetlbfs page which is *not* counted in "RSS" or "PSS" field for historical
449reasons. And these are not included in {Shared,Private}_{Clean,Dirty} field.
450"Swap" shows how much would-be-anonymous memory is also used, but out on swap.
451For shmem mappings, "Swap" includes also the size of the mapped (and not
452replaced by copy-on-write) part of the underlying shmem object out on swap.
453"SwapPss" shows proportional swap share of this mapping. Unlike "Swap", this
454does not take into account swapped out page of underlying shmem objects.
455"Locked" indicates whether the mapping is locked in memory or not.
456
457"VmFlags" field deserves a separate description. This member represents the kernel
458flags associated with the particular virtual memory area in two letter encoded
459manner. The codes are the following:
460 rd - readable
461 wr - writeable
462 ex - executable
463 sh - shared
464 mr - may read
465 mw - may write
466 me - may execute
467 ms - may share
468 gd - stack segment growns down
469 pf - pure PFN range
470 dw - disabled write to the mapped file
471 lo - pages are locked in memory
472 io - memory mapped I/O area
473 sr - sequential read advise provided
474 rr - random read advise provided
475 dc - do not copy area on fork
476 de - do not expand area on remapping
477 ac - area is accountable
478 nr - swap space is not reserved for the area
479 ht - area uses huge tlb pages
480 ar - architecture specific flag
481 dd - do not include area into core dump
482 sd - soft-dirty flag
483 mm - mixed map area
484 hg - huge page advise flag
485 nh - no-huge page advise flag
486 mg - mergable advise flag
487
488Note that there is no guarantee that every flag and associated mnemonic will
489be present in all further kernel releases. Things get changed, the flags may
490be vanished or the reverse -- new added.
491
492This file is only present if the CONFIG_MMU kernel configuration option is
493enabled.
494
495Note: reading /proc/PID/maps or /proc/PID/smaps is inherently racy (consistent
496output can be achieved only in the single read call).
497This typically manifests when doing partial reads of these files while the
498memory map is being modified. Despite the races, we do provide the following
499guarantees:
500
5011) The mapped addresses never go backwards, which implies no two
502 regions will ever overlap.
5032) If there is something at a given vaddr during the entirety of the
504 life of the smaps/maps walk, there will be some output for it.
505
506
507The /proc/PID/clear_refs is used to reset the PG_Referenced and ACCESSED/YOUNG
508bits on both physical and virtual pages associated with a process, and the
509soft-dirty bit on pte (see Documentation/vm/soft-dirty.txt for details).
510To clear the bits for all the pages associated with the process
511 > echo 1 > /proc/PID/clear_refs
512
513To clear the bits for the anonymous pages associated with the process
514 > echo 2 > /proc/PID/clear_refs
515
516To clear the bits for the file mapped pages associated with the process
517 > echo 3 > /proc/PID/clear_refs
518
519To clear the soft-dirty bit
520 > echo 4 > /proc/PID/clear_refs
521
522To reset the peak resident set size ("high water mark") to the process's
523current value:
524 > echo 5 > /proc/PID/clear_refs
525
526Any other value written to /proc/PID/clear_refs will have no effect.
527
528The /proc/pid/pagemap gives the PFN, which can be used to find the pageflags
529using /proc/kpageflags and number of times a page is mapped using
530/proc/kpagecount. For detailed explanation, see Documentation/vm/pagemap.txt.
531
532The /proc/pid/numa_maps is an extension based on maps, showing the memory
533locality and binding policy, as well as the memory usage (in pages) of
534each mapping. The output follows a general format where mapping details get
535summarized separated by blank spaces, one mapping per each file line:
536
537address policy mapping details
538
53900400000 default file=/usr/local/bin/app mapped=1 active=0 N3=1 kernelpagesize_kB=4
54000600000 default file=/usr/local/bin/app anon=1 dirty=1 N3=1 kernelpagesize_kB=4
5413206000000 default file=/lib64/ld-2.12.so mapped=26 mapmax=6 N0=24 N3=2 kernelpagesize_kB=4
542320621f000 default file=/lib64/ld-2.12.so anon=1 dirty=1 N3=1 kernelpagesize_kB=4
5433206220000 default file=/lib64/ld-2.12.so anon=1 dirty=1 N3=1 kernelpagesize_kB=4
5443206221000 default anon=1 dirty=1 N3=1 kernelpagesize_kB=4
5453206800000 default file=/lib64/libc-2.12.so mapped=59 mapmax=21 active=55 N0=41 N3=18 kernelpagesize_kB=4
546320698b000 default file=/lib64/libc-2.12.so
5473206b8a000 default file=/lib64/libc-2.12.so anon=2 dirty=2 N3=2 kernelpagesize_kB=4
5483206b8e000 default file=/lib64/libc-2.12.so anon=1 dirty=1 N3=1 kernelpagesize_kB=4
5493206b8f000 default anon=3 dirty=3 active=1 N3=3 kernelpagesize_kB=4
5507f4dc10a2000 default anon=3 dirty=3 N3=3 kernelpagesize_kB=4
5517f4dc10b4000 default anon=2 dirty=2 active=1 N3=2 kernelpagesize_kB=4
5527f4dc1200000 default file=/anon_hugepage\040(deleted) huge anon=1 dirty=1 N3=1 kernelpagesize_kB=2048
5537fff335f0000 default stack anon=3 dirty=3 N3=3 kernelpagesize_kB=4
5547fff3369d000 default mapped=1 mapmax=35 active=0 N3=1 kernelpagesize_kB=4
555
556Where:
557"address" is the starting address for the mapping;
558"policy" reports the NUMA memory policy set for the mapping (see vm/numa_memory_policy.txt);
559"mapping details" summarizes mapping data such as mapping type, page usage counters,
560node locality page counters (N0 == node0, N1 == node1, ...) and the kernel page
561size, in KB, that is backing the mapping up.
562
5631.2 Kernel data
564---------------
565
566Similar to the process entries, the kernel data files give information about
567the running kernel. The files used to obtain this information are contained in
568/proc and are listed in Table 1-5. Not all of these will be present in your
569system. It depends on the kernel configuration and the loaded modules, which
570files are there, and which are missing.
571
572Table 1-5: Kernel info in /proc
573..............................................................................
574 File Content
575 apm Advanced power management info
576 buddyinfo Kernel memory allocator information (see text) (2.5)
577 bus Directory containing bus specific information
578 cmdline Kernel command line
579 cpuinfo Info about the CPU
580 devices Available devices (block and character)
581 dma Used DMS channels
582 filesystems Supported filesystems
583 driver Various drivers grouped here, currently rtc (2.4)
584 execdomains Execdomains, related to security (2.4)
585 fb Frame Buffer devices (2.4)
586 fs File system parameters, currently nfs/exports (2.4)
587 ide Directory containing info about the IDE subsystem
588 interrupts Interrupt usage
589 iomem Memory map (2.4)
590 ioports I/O port usage
591 irq Masks for irq to cpu affinity (2.4)(smp?)
592 isapnp ISA PnP (Plug&Play) Info (2.4)
593 kcore Kernel core image (can be ELF or A.OUT(deprecated in 2.4))
594 kmsg Kernel messages
595 ksyms Kernel symbol table
596 loadavg Load average of last 1, 5 & 15 minutes
597 locks Kernel locks
598 meminfo Memory info
599 misc Miscellaneous
600 modules List of loaded modules
601 mounts Mounted filesystems
602 net Networking info (see text)
603 pagetypeinfo Additional page allocator information (see text) (2.5)
604 partitions Table of partitions known to the system
605 pci Deprecated info of PCI bus (new way -> /proc/bus/pci/,
606 decoupled by lspci (2.4)
607 rtc Real time clock
608 scsi SCSI info (see text)
609 slabinfo Slab pool info
610 softirqs softirq usage
611 stat Overall statistics
612 swaps Swap space utilization
613 sys See chapter 2
614 sysvipc Info of SysVIPC Resources (msg, sem, shm) (2.4)
615 tty Info of tty drivers
616 uptime Wall clock since boot, combined idle time of all cpus
617 version Kernel version
618 video bttv info of video resources (2.4)
619 vmallocinfo Show vmalloced areas
620..............................................................................
621
622You can, for example, check which interrupts are currently in use and what
623they are used for by looking in the file /proc/interrupts:
624
625 > cat /proc/interrupts
626 CPU0
627 0: 8728810 XT-PIC timer
628 1: 895 XT-PIC keyboard
629 2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
630 3: 531695 XT-PIC aha152x
631 4: 2014133 XT-PIC serial
632 5: 44401 XT-PIC pcnet_cs
633 8: 2 XT-PIC rtc
634 11: 8 XT-PIC i82365
635 12: 182918 XT-PIC PS/2 Mouse
636 13: 1 XT-PIC fpu
637 14: 1232265 XT-PIC ide0
638 15: 7 XT-PIC ide1
639 NMI: 0
640
641In 2.4.* a couple of lines where added to this file LOC & ERR (this time is the
642output of a SMP machine):
643
644 > cat /proc/interrupts
645
646 CPU0 CPU1
647 0: 1243498 1214548 IO-APIC-edge timer
648 1: 8949 8958 IO-APIC-edge keyboard
649 2: 0 0 XT-PIC cascade
650 5: 11286 10161 IO-APIC-edge soundblaster
651 8: 1 0 IO-APIC-edge rtc
652 9: 27422 27407 IO-APIC-edge 3c503
653 12: 113645 113873 IO-APIC-edge PS/2 Mouse
654 13: 0 0 XT-PIC fpu
655 14: 22491 24012 IO-APIC-edge ide0
656 15: 2183 2415 IO-APIC-edge ide1
657 17: 30564 30414 IO-APIC-level eth0
658 18: 177 164 IO-APIC-level bttv
659 NMI: 2457961 2457959
660 LOC: 2457882 2457881
661 ERR: 2155
662
663NMI is incremented in this case because every timer interrupt generates a NMI
664(Non Maskable Interrupt) which is used by the NMI Watchdog to detect lockups.
665
666LOC is the local interrupt counter of the internal APIC of every CPU.
667
668ERR is incremented in the case of errors in the IO-APIC bus (the bus that
669connects the CPUs in a SMP system. This means that an error has been detected,
670the IO-APIC automatically retry the transmission, so it should not be a big
671problem, but you should read the SMP-FAQ.
672
673In 2.6.2* /proc/interrupts was expanded again. This time the goal was for
674/proc/interrupts to display every IRQ vector in use by the system, not
675just those considered 'most important'. The new vectors are:
676
677 THR -- interrupt raised when a machine check threshold counter
678 (typically counting ECC corrected errors of memory or cache) exceeds
679 a configurable threshold. Only available on some systems.
680
681 TRM -- a thermal event interrupt occurs when a temperature threshold
682 has been exceeded for the CPU. This interrupt may also be generated
683 when the temperature drops back to normal.
684
685 SPU -- a spurious interrupt is some interrupt that was raised then lowered
686 by some IO device before it could be fully processed by the APIC. Hence
687 the APIC sees the interrupt but does not know what device it came from.
688 For this case the APIC will generate the interrupt with a IRQ vector
689 of 0xff. This might also be generated by chipset bugs.
690
691 RES, CAL, TLB -- rescheduling, call and TLB flush interrupts are
692 sent from one CPU to another per the needs of the OS. Typically,
693 their statistics are used by kernel developers and interested users to
694 determine the occurrence of interrupts of the given type.
695
696The above IRQ vectors are displayed only when relevant. For example,
697the threshold vector does not exist on x86_64 platforms. Others are
698suppressed when the system is a uniprocessor. As of this writing, only
699i386 and x86_64 platforms support the new IRQ vector displays.
700
701Of some interest is the introduction of the /proc/irq directory to 2.4.
702It could be used to set IRQ to CPU affinity, this means that you can "hook" an
703IRQ to only one CPU, or to exclude a CPU of handling IRQs. The contents of the
704irq subdir is one subdir for each IRQ, and two files; default_smp_affinity and
705prof_cpu_mask.
706
707For example
708 > ls /proc/irq/
709 0 10 12 14 16 18 2 4 6 8 prof_cpu_mask
710 1 11 13 15 17 19 3 5 7 9 default_smp_affinity
711 > ls /proc/irq/0/
712 smp_affinity
713
714smp_affinity is a bitmask, in which you can specify which CPUs can handle the
715IRQ, you can set it by doing:
716
717 > echo 1 > /proc/irq/10/smp_affinity
718
719This means that only the first CPU will handle the IRQ, but you can also echo
7205 which means that only the first and third CPU can handle the IRQ.
721
722The contents of each smp_affinity file is the same by default:
723
724 > cat /proc/irq/0/smp_affinity
725 ffffffff
726
727There is an alternate interface, smp_affinity_list which allows specifying
728a cpu range instead of a bitmask:
729
730 > cat /proc/irq/0/smp_affinity_list
731 1024-1031
732
733The default_smp_affinity mask applies to all non-active IRQs, which are the
734IRQs which have not yet been allocated/activated, and hence which lack a
735/proc/irq/[0-9]* directory.
736
737The node file on an SMP system shows the node to which the device using the IRQ
738reports itself as being attached. This hardware locality information does not
739include information about any possible driver locality preference.
740
741prof_cpu_mask specifies which CPUs are to be profiled by the system wide
742profiler. Default value is ffffffff (all cpus if there are only 32 of them).
743
744The way IRQs are routed is handled by the IO-APIC, and it's Round Robin
745between all the CPUs which are allowed to handle it. As usual the kernel has
746more info than you and does a better job than you, so the defaults are the
747best choice for almost everyone. [Note this applies only to those IO-APIC's
748that support "Round Robin" interrupt distribution.]
749
750There are three more important subdirectories in /proc: net, scsi, and sys.
751The general rule is that the contents, or even the existence of these
752directories, depend on your kernel configuration. If SCSI is not enabled, the
753directory scsi may not exist. The same is true with the net, which is there
754only when networking support is present in the running kernel.
755
756The slabinfo file gives information about memory usage at the slab level.
757Linux uses slab pools for memory management above page level in version 2.2.
758Commonly used objects have their own slab pool (such as network buffers,
759directory cache, and so on).
760
761..............................................................................
762
763> cat /proc/buddyinfo
764
765Node 0, zone DMA 0 4 5 4 4 3 ...
766Node 0, zone Normal 1 0 0 1 101 8 ...
767Node 0, zone HighMem 2 0 0 1 1 0 ...
768
769External fragmentation is a problem under some workloads, and buddyinfo is a
770useful tool for helping diagnose these problems. Buddyinfo will give you a
771clue as to how big an area you can safely allocate, or why a previous
772allocation failed.
773
774Each column represents the number of pages of a certain order which are
775available. In this case, there are 0 chunks of 2^0*PAGE_SIZE available in
776ZONE_DMA, 4 chunks of 2^1*PAGE_SIZE in ZONE_DMA, 101 chunks of 2^4*PAGE_SIZE
777available in ZONE_NORMAL, etc...
778
779More information relevant to external fragmentation can be found in
780pagetypeinfo.
781
782> cat /proc/pagetypeinfo
783Page block order: 9
784Pages per block: 512
785
786Free pages count per migrate type at order 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
787Node 0, zone DMA, type Unmovable 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0
788Node 0, zone DMA, type Reclaimable 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
789Node 0, zone DMA, type Movable 1 1 2 1 2 1 1 0 1 0 2
790Node 0, zone DMA, type Reserve 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0
791Node 0, zone DMA, type Isolate 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
792Node 0, zone DMA32, type Unmovable 103 54 77 1 1 1 11 8 7 1 9
793Node 0, zone DMA32, type Reclaimable 0 0 2 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0
794Node 0, zone DMA32, type Movable 169 152 113 91 77 54 39 13 6 1 452
795Node 0, zone DMA32, type Reserve 1 2 2 2 2 0 1 1 1 1 0
796Node 0, zone DMA32, type Isolate 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
797
798Number of blocks type Unmovable Reclaimable Movable Reserve Isolate
799Node 0, zone DMA 2 0 5 1 0
800Node 0, zone DMA32 41 6 967 2 0
801
802Fragmentation avoidance in the kernel works by grouping pages of different
803migrate types into the same contiguous regions of memory called page blocks.
804A page block is typically the size of the default hugepage size e.g. 2MB on
805X86-64. By keeping pages grouped based on their ability to move, the kernel
806can reclaim pages within a page block to satisfy a high-order allocation.
807
808The pagetypinfo begins with information on the size of a page block. It
809then gives the same type of information as buddyinfo except broken down
810by migrate-type and finishes with details on how many page blocks of each
811type exist.
812
813If min_free_kbytes has been tuned correctly (recommendations made by hugeadm
814from libhugetlbfs https://github.com/libhugetlbfs/libhugetlbfs/), one can
815make an estimate of the likely number of huge pages that can be allocated
816at a given point in time. All the "Movable" blocks should be allocatable
817unless memory has been mlock()'d. Some of the Reclaimable blocks should
818also be allocatable although a lot of filesystem metadata may have to be
819reclaimed to achieve this.
820
821..............................................................................
822
823meminfo:
824
825Provides information about distribution and utilization of memory. This
826varies by architecture and compile options. The following is from a
82716GB PIII, which has highmem enabled. You may not have all of these fields.
828
829> cat /proc/meminfo
830
831MemTotal: 16344972 kB
832MemFree: 13634064 kB
833MemAvailable: 14836172 kB
834Buffers: 3656 kB
835Cached: 1195708 kB
836SwapCached: 0 kB
837Active: 891636 kB
838Inactive: 1077224 kB
839HighTotal: 15597528 kB
840HighFree: 13629632 kB
841LowTotal: 747444 kB
842LowFree: 4432 kB
843SwapTotal: 0 kB
844SwapFree: 0 kB
845Dirty: 968 kB
846Writeback: 0 kB
847AnonPages: 861800 kB
848Mapped: 280372 kB
849Shmem: 644 kB
850Slab: 284364 kB
851SReclaimable: 159856 kB
852SUnreclaim: 124508 kB
853PageTables: 24448 kB
854NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
855Bounce: 0 kB
856WritebackTmp: 0 kB
857CommitLimit: 7669796 kB
858Committed_AS: 100056 kB
859VmallocTotal: 112216 kB
860VmallocUsed: 428 kB
861VmallocChunk: 111088 kB
862AnonHugePages: 49152 kB
863ShmemHugePages: 0 kB
864ShmemPmdMapped: 0 kB
865
866
867 MemTotal: Total usable ram (i.e. physical ram minus a few reserved
868 bits and the kernel binary code)
869 MemFree: The sum of LowFree+HighFree
870MemAvailable: An estimate of how much memory is available for starting new
871 applications, without swapping. Calculated from MemFree,
872 SReclaimable, the size of the file LRU lists, and the low
873 watermarks in each zone.
874 The estimate takes into account that the system needs some
875 page cache to function well, and that not all reclaimable
876 slab will be reclaimable, due to items being in use. The
877 impact of those factors will vary from system to system.
878 Buffers: Relatively temporary storage for raw disk blocks
879 shouldn't get tremendously large (20MB or so)
880 Cached: in-memory cache for files read from the disk (the
881 pagecache). Doesn't include SwapCached
882 SwapCached: Memory that once was swapped out, is swapped back in but
883 still also is in the swapfile (if memory is needed it
884 doesn't need to be swapped out AGAIN because it is already
885 in the swapfile. This saves I/O)
886 Active: Memory that has been used more recently and usually not
887 reclaimed unless absolutely necessary.
888 Inactive: Memory which has been less recently used. It is more
889 eligible to be reclaimed for other purposes
890 HighTotal:
891 HighFree: Highmem is all memory above ~860MB of physical memory
892 Highmem areas are for use by userspace programs, or
893 for the pagecache. The kernel must use tricks to access
894 this memory, making it slower to access than lowmem.
895 LowTotal:
896 LowFree: Lowmem is memory which can be used for everything that
897 highmem can be used for, but it is also available for the
898 kernel's use for its own data structures. Among many
899 other things, it is where everything from the Slab is
900 allocated. Bad things happen when you're out of lowmem.
901 SwapTotal: total amount of swap space available
902 SwapFree: Memory which has been evicted from RAM, and is temporarily
903 on the disk
904 Dirty: Memory which is waiting to get written back to the disk
905 Writeback: Memory which is actively being written back to the disk
906 AnonPages: Non-file backed pages mapped into userspace page tables
907AnonHugePages: Non-file backed huge pages mapped into userspace page tables
908 Mapped: files which have been mmaped, such as libraries
909 Shmem: Total memory used by shared memory (shmem) and tmpfs
910ShmemHugePages: Memory used by shared memory (shmem) and tmpfs allocated
911 with huge pages
912ShmemPmdMapped: Shared memory mapped into userspace with huge pages
913 Slab: in-kernel data structures cache
914SReclaimable: Part of Slab, that might be reclaimed, such as caches
915 SUnreclaim: Part of Slab, that cannot be reclaimed on memory pressure
916 PageTables: amount of memory dedicated to the lowest level of page
917 tables.
918NFS_Unstable: NFS pages sent to the server, but not yet committed to stable
919 storage
920 Bounce: Memory used for block device "bounce buffers"
921WritebackTmp: Memory used by FUSE for temporary writeback buffers
922 CommitLimit: Based on the overcommit ratio ('vm.overcommit_ratio'),
923 this is the total amount of memory currently available to
924 be allocated on the system. This limit is only adhered to
925 if strict overcommit accounting is enabled (mode 2 in
926 'vm.overcommit_memory').
927 The CommitLimit is calculated with the following formula:
928 CommitLimit = ([total RAM pages] - [total huge TLB pages]) *
929 overcommit_ratio / 100 + [total swap pages]
930 For example, on a system with 1G of physical RAM and 7G
931 of swap with a `vm.overcommit_ratio` of 30 it would
932 yield a CommitLimit of 7.3G.
933 For more details, see the memory overcommit documentation
934 in vm/overcommit-accounting.
935Committed_AS: The amount of memory presently allocated on the system.
936 The committed memory is a sum of all of the memory which
937 has been allocated by processes, even if it has not been
938 "used" by them as of yet. A process which malloc()'s 1G
939 of memory, but only touches 300M of it will show up as
940 using 1G. This 1G is memory which has been "committed" to
941 by the VM and can be used at any time by the allocating
942 application. With strict overcommit enabled on the system
943 (mode 2 in 'vm.overcommit_memory'),allocations which would
944 exceed the CommitLimit (detailed above) will not be permitted.
945 This is useful if one needs to guarantee that processes will
946 not fail due to lack of memory once that memory has been
947 successfully allocated.
948VmallocTotal: total size of vmalloc memory area
949 VmallocUsed: amount of vmalloc area which is used
950VmallocChunk: largest contiguous block of vmalloc area which is free
951
952..............................................................................
953
954vmallocinfo:
955
956Provides information about vmalloced/vmaped areas. One line per area,
957containing the virtual address range of the area, size in bytes,
958caller information of the creator, and optional information depending
959on the kind of area :
960
961 pages=nr number of pages
962 phys=addr if a physical address was specified
963 ioremap I/O mapping (ioremap() and friends)
964 vmalloc vmalloc() area
965 vmap vmap()ed pages
966 user VM_USERMAP area
967 vpages buffer for pages pointers was vmalloced (huge area)
968 N<node>=nr (Only on NUMA kernels)
969 Number of pages allocated on memory node <node>
970
971> cat /proc/vmallocinfo
9720xffffc20000000000-0xffffc20000201000 2101248 alloc_large_system_hash+0x204 ...
973 /0x2c0 pages=512 vmalloc N0=128 N1=128 N2=128 N3=128
9740xffffc20000201000-0xffffc20000302000 1052672 alloc_large_system_hash+0x204 ...
975 /0x2c0 pages=256 vmalloc N0=64 N1=64 N2=64 N3=64
9760xffffc20000302000-0xffffc20000304000 8192 acpi_tb_verify_table+0x21/0x4f...
977 phys=7fee8000 ioremap
9780xffffc20000304000-0xffffc20000307000 12288 acpi_tb_verify_table+0x21/0x4f...
979 phys=7fee7000 ioremap
9800xffffc2000031d000-0xffffc2000031f000 8192 init_vdso_vars+0x112/0x210
9810xffffc2000031f000-0xffffc2000032b000 49152 cramfs_uncompress_init+0x2e ...
982 /0x80 pages=11 vmalloc N0=3 N1=3 N2=2 N3=3
9830xffffc2000033a000-0xffffc2000033d000 12288 sys_swapon+0x640/0xac0 ...
984 pages=2 vmalloc N1=2
9850xffffc20000347000-0xffffc2000034c000 20480 xt_alloc_table_info+0xfe ...
986 /0x130 [x_tables] pages=4 vmalloc N0=4
9870xffffffffa0000000-0xffffffffa000f000 61440 sys_init_module+0xc27/0x1d00 ...
988 pages=14 vmalloc N2=14
9890xffffffffa000f000-0xffffffffa0014000 20480 sys_init_module+0xc27/0x1d00 ...
990 pages=4 vmalloc N1=4
9910xffffffffa0014000-0xffffffffa0017000 12288 sys_init_module+0xc27/0x1d00 ...
992 pages=2 vmalloc N1=2
9930xffffffffa0017000-0xffffffffa0022000 45056 sys_init_module+0xc27/0x1d00 ...
994 pages=10 vmalloc N0=10
995
996..............................................................................
997
998softirqs:
999
1000Provides counts of softirq handlers serviced since boot time, for each cpu.
1001
1002> cat /proc/softirqs
1003 CPU0 CPU1 CPU2 CPU3
1004 HI: 0 0 0 0
1005 TIMER: 27166 27120 27097 27034
1006 NET_TX: 0 0 0 17
1007 NET_RX: 42 0 0 39
1008 BLOCK: 0 0 107 1121
1009 TASKLET: 0 0 0 290
1010 SCHED: 27035 26983 26971 26746
1011 HRTIMER: 0 0 0 0
1012 RCU: 1678 1769 2178 2250
1013
1014
10151.3 IDE devices in /proc/ide
1016----------------------------
1017
1018The subdirectory /proc/ide contains information about all IDE devices of which
1019the kernel is aware. There is one subdirectory for each IDE controller, the
1020file drivers and a link for each IDE device, pointing to the device directory
1021in the controller specific subtree.
1022
1023The file drivers contains general information about the drivers used for the
1024IDE devices:
1025
1026 > cat /proc/ide/drivers
1027 ide-cdrom version 4.53
1028 ide-disk version 1.08
1029
1030More detailed information can be found in the controller specific
1031subdirectories. These are named ide0, ide1 and so on. Each of these
1032directories contains the files shown in table 1-6.
1033
1034
1035Table 1-6: IDE controller info in /proc/ide/ide?
1036..............................................................................
1037 File Content
1038 channel IDE channel (0 or 1)
1039 config Configuration (only for PCI/IDE bridge)
1040 mate Mate name
1041 model Type/Chipset of IDE controller
1042..............................................................................
1043
1044Each device connected to a controller has a separate subdirectory in the
1045controllers directory. The files listed in table 1-7 are contained in these
1046directories.
1047
1048
1049Table 1-7: IDE device information
1050..............................................................................
1051 File Content
1052 cache The cache
1053 capacity Capacity of the medium (in 512Byte blocks)
1054 driver driver and version
1055 geometry physical and logical geometry
1056 identify device identify block
1057 media media type
1058 model device identifier
1059 settings device setup
1060 smart_thresholds IDE disk management thresholds
1061 smart_values IDE disk management values
1062..............................................................................
1063
1064The most interesting file is settings. This file contains a nice overview of
1065the drive parameters:
1066
1067 # cat /proc/ide/ide0/hda/settings
1068 name value min max mode
1069 ---- ----- --- --- ----
1070 bios_cyl 526 0 65535 rw
1071 bios_head 255 0 255 rw
1072 bios_sect 63 0 63 rw
1073 breada_readahead 4 0 127 rw
1074 bswap 0 0 1 r
1075 file_readahead 72 0 2097151 rw
1076 io_32bit 0 0 3 rw
1077 keepsettings 0 0 1 rw
1078 max_kb_per_request 122 1 127 rw
1079 multcount 0 0 8 rw
1080 nice1 1 0 1 rw
1081 nowerr 0 0 1 rw
1082 pio_mode write-only 0 255 w
1083 slow 0 0 1 rw
1084 unmaskirq 0 0 1 rw
1085 using_dma 0 0 1 rw
1086
1087
10881.4 Networking info in /proc/net
1089--------------------------------
1090
1091The subdirectory /proc/net follows the usual pattern. Table 1-8 shows the
1092additional values you get for IP version 6 if you configure the kernel to
1093support this. Table 1-9 lists the files and their meaning.
1094
1095
1096Table 1-8: IPv6 info in /proc/net
1097..............................................................................
1098 File Content
1099 udp6 UDP sockets (IPv6)
1100 tcp6 TCP sockets (IPv6)
1101 raw6 Raw device statistics (IPv6)
1102 igmp6 IP multicast addresses, which this host joined (IPv6)
1103 if_inet6 List of IPv6 interface addresses
1104 ipv6_route Kernel routing table for IPv6
1105 rt6_stats Global IPv6 routing tables statistics
1106 sockstat6 Socket statistics (IPv6)
1107 snmp6 Snmp data (IPv6)
1108..............................................................................
1109
1110
1111Table 1-9: Network info in /proc/net
1112..............................................................................
1113 File Content
1114 arp Kernel ARP table
1115 dev network devices with statistics
1116 dev_mcast the Layer2 multicast groups a device is listening too
1117 (interface index, label, number of references, number of bound
1118 addresses).
1119 dev_stat network device status
1120 ip_fwchains Firewall chain linkage
1121 ip_fwnames Firewall chain names
1122 ip_masq Directory containing the masquerading tables
1123 ip_masquerade Major masquerading table
1124 netstat Network statistics
1125 raw raw device statistics
1126 route Kernel routing table
1127 rpc Directory containing rpc info
1128 rt_cache Routing cache
1129 snmp SNMP data
1130 sockstat Socket statistics
1131 tcp TCP sockets
1132 udp UDP sockets
1133 unix UNIX domain sockets
1134 wireless Wireless interface data (Wavelan etc)
1135 igmp IP multicast addresses, which this host joined
1136 psched Global packet scheduler parameters.
1137 netlink List of PF_NETLINK sockets
1138 ip_mr_vifs List of multicast virtual interfaces
1139 ip_mr_cache List of multicast routing cache
1140..............................................................................
1141
1142You can use this information to see which network devices are available in
1143your system and how much traffic was routed over those devices:
1144
1145 > cat /proc/net/dev
1146 Inter-|Receive |[...
1147 face |bytes packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast|[...
1148 lo: 908188 5596 0 0 0 0 0 0 [...
1149 ppp0:15475140 20721 410 0 0 410 0 0 [...
1150 eth0: 614530 7085 0 0 0 0 0 1 [...
1151
1152 ...] Transmit
1153 ...] bytes packets errs drop fifo colls carrier compressed
1154 ...] 908188 5596 0 0 0 0 0 0
1155 ...] 1375103 17405 0 0 0 0 0 0
1156 ...] 1703981 5535 0 0 0 3 0 0
1157
1158In addition, each Channel Bond interface has its own directory. For
1159example, the bond0 device will have a directory called /proc/net/bond0/.
1160It will contain information that is specific to that bond, such as the
1161current slaves of the bond, the link status of the slaves, and how
1162many times the slaves link has failed.
1163
11641.5 SCSI info
1165-------------
1166
1167If you have a SCSI host adapter in your system, you'll find a subdirectory
1168named after the driver for this adapter in /proc/scsi. You'll also see a list
1169of all recognized SCSI devices in /proc/scsi:
1170
1171 >cat /proc/scsi/scsi
1172 Attached devices:
1173 Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
1174 Vendor: IBM Model: DGHS09U Rev: 03E0
1175 Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 03
1176 Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 06 Lun: 00
1177 Vendor: PIONEER Model: CD-ROM DR-U06S Rev: 1.04
1178 Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 02
1179
1180
1181The directory named after the driver has one file for each adapter found in
1182the system. These files contain information about the controller, including
1183the used IRQ and the IO address range. The amount of information shown is
1184dependent on the adapter you use. The example shows the output for an Adaptec
1185AHA-2940 SCSI adapter:
1186
1187 > cat /proc/scsi/aic7xxx/0
1188
1189 Adaptec AIC7xxx driver version: 5.1.19/3.2.4
1190 Compile Options:
1191 TCQ Enabled By Default : Disabled
1192 AIC7XXX_PROC_STATS : Disabled
1193 AIC7XXX_RESET_DELAY : 5
1194 Adapter Configuration:
1195 SCSI Adapter: Adaptec AHA-294X Ultra SCSI host adapter
1196 Ultra Wide Controller
1197 PCI MMAPed I/O Base: 0xeb001000
1198 Adapter SEEPROM Config: SEEPROM found and used.
1199 Adaptec SCSI BIOS: Enabled
1200 IRQ: 10
1201 SCBs: Active 0, Max Active 2,
1202 Allocated 15, HW 16, Page 255
1203 Interrupts: 160328
1204 BIOS Control Word: 0x18b6
1205 Adapter Control Word: 0x005b
1206 Extended Translation: Enabled
1207 Disconnect Enable Flags: 0xffff
1208 Ultra Enable Flags: 0x0001
1209 Tag Queue Enable Flags: 0x0000
1210 Ordered Queue Tag Flags: 0x0000
1211 Default Tag Queue Depth: 8
1212 Tagged Queue By Device array for aic7xxx host instance 0:
1213 {255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255}
1214 Actual queue depth per device for aic7xxx host instance 0:
1215 {1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1}
1216 Statistics:
1217 (scsi0:0:0:0)
1218 Device using Wide/Sync transfers at 40.0 MByte/sec, offset 8
1219 Transinfo settings: current(12/8/1/0), goal(12/8/1/0), user(12/15/1/0)
1220 Total transfers 160151 (74577 reads and 85574 writes)
1221 (scsi0:0:6:0)
1222 Device using Narrow/Sync transfers at 5.0 MByte/sec, offset 15
1223 Transinfo settings: current(50/15/0/0), goal(50/15/0/0), user(50/15/0/0)
1224 Total transfers 0 (0 reads and 0 writes)
1225
1226
12271.6 Parallel port info in /proc/parport
1228---------------------------------------
1229
1230The directory /proc/parport contains information about the parallel ports of
1231your system. It has one subdirectory for each port, named after the port
1232number (0,1,2,...).
1233
1234These directories contain the four files shown in Table 1-10.
1235
1236
1237Table 1-10: Files in /proc/parport
1238..............................................................................
1239 File Content
1240 autoprobe Any IEEE-1284 device ID information that has been acquired.
1241 devices list of the device drivers using that port. A + will appear by the
1242 name of the device currently using the port (it might not appear
1243 against any).
1244 hardware Parallel port's base address, IRQ line and DMA channel.
1245 irq IRQ that parport is using for that port. This is in a separate
1246 file to allow you to alter it by writing a new value in (IRQ
1247 number or none).
1248..............................................................................
1249
12501.7 TTY info in /proc/tty
1251-------------------------
1252
1253Information about the available and actually used tty's can be found in the
1254directory /proc/tty.You'll find entries for drivers and line disciplines in
1255this directory, as shown in Table 1-11.
1256
1257
1258Table 1-11: Files in /proc/tty
1259..............................................................................
1260 File Content
1261 drivers list of drivers and their usage
1262 ldiscs registered line disciplines
1263 driver/serial usage statistic and status of single tty lines
1264..............................................................................
1265
1266To see which tty's are currently in use, you can simply look into the file
1267/proc/tty/drivers:
1268
1269 > cat /proc/tty/drivers
1270 pty_slave /dev/pts 136 0-255 pty:slave
1271 pty_master /dev/ptm 128 0-255 pty:master
1272 pty_slave /dev/ttyp 3 0-255 pty:slave
1273 pty_master /dev/pty 2 0-255 pty:master
1274 serial /dev/cua 5 64-67 serial:callout
1275 serial /dev/ttyS 4 64-67 serial
1276 /dev/tty0 /dev/tty0 4 0 system:vtmaster
1277 /dev/ptmx /dev/ptmx 5 2 system
1278 /dev/console /dev/console 5 1 system:console
1279 /dev/tty /dev/tty 5 0 system:/dev/tty
1280 unknown /dev/tty 4 1-63 console
1281
1282
12831.8 Miscellaneous kernel statistics in /proc/stat
1284-------------------------------------------------
1285
1286Various pieces of information about kernel activity are available in the
1287/proc/stat file. All of the numbers reported in this file are aggregates
1288since the system first booted. For a quick look, simply cat the file:
1289
1290 > cat /proc/stat
1291 cpu 2255 34 2290 22625563 6290 127 456 0 0 0
1292 cpu0 1132 34 1441 11311718 3675 127 438 0 0 0
1293 cpu1 1123 0 849 11313845 2614 0 18 0 0 0
1294 intr 114930548 113199788 3 0 5 263 0 4 [... lots more numbers ...]
1295 ctxt 1990473
1296 btime 1062191376
1297 processes 2915
1298 procs_running 1
1299 procs_blocked 0
1300 softirq 183433 0 21755 12 39 1137 231 21459 2263
1301
1302The very first "cpu" line aggregates the numbers in all of the other "cpuN"
1303lines. These numbers identify the amount of time the CPU has spent performing
1304different kinds of work. Time units are in USER_HZ (typically hundredths of a
1305second). The meanings of the columns are as follows, from left to right:
1306
1307- user: normal processes executing in user mode
1308- nice: niced processes executing in user mode
1309- system: processes executing in kernel mode
1310- idle: twiddling thumbs
1311- iowait: In a word, iowait stands for waiting for I/O to complete. But there
1312 are several problems:
1313 1. Cpu will not wait for I/O to complete, iowait is the time that a task is
1314 waiting for I/O to complete. When cpu goes into idle state for
1315 outstanding task io, another task will be scheduled on this CPU.
1316 2. In a multi-core CPU, the task waiting for I/O to complete is not running
1317 on any CPU, so the iowait of each CPU is difficult to calculate.
1318 3. The value of iowait field in /proc/stat will decrease in certain
1319 conditions.
1320 So, the iowait is not reliable by reading from /proc/stat.
1321- irq: servicing interrupts
1322- softirq: servicing softirqs
1323- steal: involuntary wait
1324- guest: running a normal guest
1325- guest_nice: running a niced guest
1326
1327The "intr" line gives counts of interrupts serviced since boot time, for each
1328of the possible system interrupts. The first column is the total of all
1329interrupts serviced including unnumbered architecture specific interrupts;
1330each subsequent column is the total for that particular numbered interrupt.
1331Unnumbered interrupts are not shown, only summed into the total.
1332
1333The "ctxt" line gives the total number of context switches across all CPUs.
1334
1335The "btime" line gives the time at which the system booted, in seconds since
1336the Unix epoch.
1337
1338The "processes" line gives the number of processes and threads created, which
1339includes (but is not limited to) those created by calls to the fork() and
1340clone() system calls.
1341
1342The "procs_running" line gives the total number of threads that are
1343running or ready to run (i.e., the total number of runnable threads).
1344
1345The "procs_blocked" line gives the number of processes currently blocked,
1346waiting for I/O to complete.
1347
1348The "softirq" line gives counts of softirqs serviced since boot time, for each
1349of the possible system softirqs. The first column is the total of all
1350softirqs serviced; each subsequent column is the total for that particular
1351softirq.
1352
1353
13541.9 Ext4 file system parameters
1355-------------------------------
1356
1357Information about mounted ext4 file systems can be found in
1358/proc/fs/ext4. Each mounted filesystem will have a directory in
1359/proc/fs/ext4 based on its device name (i.e., /proc/fs/ext4/hdc or
1360/proc/fs/ext4/dm-0). The files in each per-device directory are shown
1361in Table 1-12, below.
1362
1363Table 1-12: Files in /proc/fs/ext4/<devname>
1364..............................................................................
1365 File Content
1366 mb_groups details of multiblock allocator buddy cache of free blocks
1367..............................................................................
1368
13692.0 /proc/consoles
1370------------------
1371Shows registered system console lines.
1372
1373To see which character device lines are currently used for the system console
1374/dev/console, you may simply look into the file /proc/consoles:
1375
1376 > cat /proc/consoles
1377 tty0 -WU (ECp) 4:7
1378 ttyS0 -W- (Ep) 4:64
1379
1380The columns are:
1381
1382 device name of the device
1383 operations R = can do read operations
1384 W = can do write operations
1385 U = can do unblank
1386 flags E = it is enabled
1387 C = it is preferred console
1388 B = it is primary boot console
1389 p = it is used for printk buffer
1390 b = it is not a TTY but a Braille device
1391 a = it is safe to use when cpu is offline
1392 major:minor major and minor number of the device separated by a colon
1393
1394------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1395Summary
1396------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1397The /proc file system serves information about the running system. It not only
1398allows access to process data but also allows you to request the kernel status
1399by reading files in the hierarchy.
1400
1401The directory structure of /proc reflects the types of information and makes
1402it easy, if not obvious, where to look for specific data.
1403------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1404
1405------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1406CHAPTER 2: MODIFYING SYSTEM PARAMETERS
1407------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1408
1409------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1410In This Chapter
1411------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1412* Modifying kernel parameters by writing into files found in /proc/sys
1413* Exploring the files which modify certain parameters
1414* Review of the /proc/sys file tree
1415------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1416
1417
1418A very interesting part of /proc is the directory /proc/sys. This is not only
1419a source of information, it also allows you to change parameters within the
1420kernel. Be very careful when attempting this. You can optimize your system,
1421but you can also cause it to crash. Never alter kernel parameters on a
1422production system. Set up a development machine and test to make sure that
1423everything works the way you want it to. You may have no alternative but to
1424reboot the machine once an error has been made.
1425
1426To change a value, simply echo the new value into the file. An example is
1427given below in the section on the file system data. You need to be root to do
1428this. You can create your own boot script to perform this every time your
1429system boots.
1430
1431The files in /proc/sys can be used to fine tune and monitor miscellaneous and
1432general things in the operation of the Linux kernel. Since some of the files
1433can inadvertently disrupt your system, it is advisable to read both
1434documentation and source before actually making adjustments. In any case, be
1435very careful when writing to any of these files. The entries in /proc may
1436change slightly between the 2.1.* and the 2.2 kernel, so if there is any doubt
1437review the kernel documentation in the directory /usr/src/linux/Documentation.
1438This chapter is heavily based on the documentation included in the pre 2.2
1439kernels, and became part of it in version 2.2.1 of the Linux kernel.
1440
1441Please see: Documentation/sysctl/ directory for descriptions of these
1442entries.
1443
1444------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1445Summary
1446------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1447Certain aspects of kernel behavior can be modified at runtime, without the
1448need to recompile the kernel, or even to reboot the system. The files in the
1449/proc/sys tree can not only be read, but also modified. You can use the echo
1450command to write value into these files, thereby changing the default settings
1451of the kernel.
1452------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1453
1454------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1455CHAPTER 3: PER-PROCESS PARAMETERS
1456------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1457
14583.1 /proc/<pid>/oom_adj & /proc/<pid>/oom_score_adj- Adjust the oom-killer score
1459--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1460
1461These file can be used to adjust the badness heuristic used to select which
1462process gets killed in out of memory conditions.
1463
1464The badness heuristic assigns a value to each candidate task ranging from 0
1465(never kill) to 1000 (always kill) to determine which process is targeted. The
1466units are roughly a proportion along that range of allowed memory the process
1467may allocate from based on an estimation of its current memory and swap use.
1468For example, if a task is using all allowed memory, its badness score will be
14691000. If it is using half of its allowed memory, its score will be 500.
1470
1471There is an additional factor included in the badness score: the current memory
1472and swap usage is discounted by 3% for root processes.
1473
1474The amount of "allowed" memory depends on the context in which the oom killer
1475was called. If it is due to the memory assigned to the allocating task's cpuset
1476being exhausted, the allowed memory represents the set of mems assigned to that
1477cpuset. If it is due to a mempolicy's node(s) being exhausted, the allowed
1478memory represents the set of mempolicy nodes. If it is due to a memory
1479limit (or swap limit) being reached, the allowed memory is that configured
1480limit. Finally, if it is due to the entire system being out of memory, the
1481allowed memory represents all allocatable resources.
1482
1483The value of /proc/<pid>/oom_score_adj is added to the badness score before it
1484is used to determine which task to kill. Acceptable values range from -1000
1485(OOM_SCORE_ADJ_MIN) to +1000 (OOM_SCORE_ADJ_MAX). This allows userspace to
1486polarize the preference for oom killing either by always preferring a certain
1487task or completely disabling it. The lowest possible value, -1000, is
1488equivalent to disabling oom killing entirely for that task since it will always
1489report a badness score of 0.
1490
1491Consequently, it is very simple for userspace to define the amount of memory to
1492consider for each task. Setting a /proc/<pid>/oom_score_adj value of +500, for
1493example, is roughly equivalent to allowing the remainder of tasks sharing the
1494same system, cpuset, mempolicy, or memory controller resources to use at least
149550% more memory. A value of -500, on the other hand, would be roughly
1496equivalent to discounting 50% of the task's allowed memory from being considered
1497as scoring against the task.
1498
1499For backwards compatibility with previous kernels, /proc/<pid>/oom_adj may also
1500be used to tune the badness score. Its acceptable values range from -16
1501(OOM_ADJUST_MIN) to +15 (OOM_ADJUST_MAX) and a special value of -17
1502(OOM_DISABLE) to disable oom killing entirely for that task. Its value is
1503scaled linearly with /proc/<pid>/oom_score_adj.
1504
1505The value of /proc/<pid>/oom_score_adj may be reduced no lower than the last
1506value set by a CAP_SYS_RESOURCE process. To reduce the value any lower
1507requires CAP_SYS_RESOURCE.
1508
1509Caveat: when a parent task is selected, the oom killer will sacrifice any first
1510generation children with separate address spaces instead, if possible. This
1511avoids servers and important system daemons from being killed and loses the
1512minimal amount of work.
1513
1514
15153.2 /proc/<pid>/oom_score - Display current oom-killer score
1516-------------------------------------------------------------
1517
1518This file can be used to check the current score used by the oom-killer is for
1519any given <pid>. Use it together with /proc/<pid>/oom_score_adj to tune which
1520process should be killed in an out-of-memory situation.
1521
1522
15233.3 /proc/<pid>/io - Display the IO accounting fields
1524-------------------------------------------------------
1525
1526This file contains IO statistics for each running process
1527
1528Example
1529-------
1530
1531test:/tmp # dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test.dat &
1532[1] 3828
1533
1534test:/tmp # cat /proc/3828/io
1535rchar: 323934931
1536wchar: 323929600
1537syscr: 632687
1538syscw: 632675
1539read_bytes: 0
1540write_bytes: 323932160
1541cancelled_write_bytes: 0
1542
1543
1544Description
1545-----------
1546
1547rchar
1548-----
1549
1550I/O counter: chars read
1551The number of bytes which this task has caused to be read from storage. This
1552is simply the sum of bytes which this process passed to read() and pread().
1553It includes things like tty IO and it is unaffected by whether or not actual
1554physical disk IO was required (the read might have been satisfied from
1555pagecache)
1556
1557
1558wchar
1559-----
1560
1561I/O counter: chars written
1562The number of bytes which this task has caused, or shall cause to be written
1563to disk. Similar caveats apply here as with rchar.
1564
1565
1566syscr
1567-----
1568
1569I/O counter: read syscalls
1570Attempt to count the number of read I/O operations, i.e. syscalls like read()
1571and pread().
1572
1573
1574syscw
1575-----
1576
1577I/O counter: write syscalls
1578Attempt to count the number of write I/O operations, i.e. syscalls like
1579write() and pwrite().
1580
1581
1582read_bytes
1583----------
1584
1585I/O counter: bytes read
1586Attempt to count the number of bytes which this process really did cause to
1587be fetched from the storage layer. Done at the submit_bio() level, so it is
1588accurate for block-backed filesystems. <please add status regarding NFS and
1589CIFS at a later time>
1590
1591
1592write_bytes
1593-----------
1594
1595I/O counter: bytes written
1596Attempt to count the number of bytes which this process caused to be sent to
1597the storage layer. This is done at page-dirtying time.
1598
1599
1600cancelled_write_bytes
1601---------------------
1602
1603The big inaccuracy here is truncate. If a process writes 1MB to a file and
1604then deletes the file, it will in fact perform no writeout. But it will have
1605been accounted as having caused 1MB of write.
1606In other words: The number of bytes which this process caused to not happen,
1607by truncating pagecache. A task can cause "negative" IO too. If this task
1608truncates some dirty pagecache, some IO which another task has been accounted
1609for (in its write_bytes) will not be happening. We _could_ just subtract that
1610from the truncating task's write_bytes, but there is information loss in doing
1611that.
1612
1613
1614Note
1615----
1616
1617At its current implementation state, this is a bit racy on 32-bit machines: if
1618process A reads process B's /proc/pid/io while process B is updating one of
1619those 64-bit counters, process A could see an intermediate result.
1620
1621
1622More information about this can be found within the taskstats documentation in
1623Documentation/accounting.
1624
16253.4 /proc/<pid>/coredump_filter - Core dump filtering settings
1626---------------------------------------------------------------
1627When a process is dumped, all anonymous memory is written to a core file as
1628long as the size of the core file isn't limited. But sometimes we don't want
1629to dump some memory segments, for example, huge shared memory or DAX.
1630Conversely, sometimes we want to save file-backed memory segments into a core
1631file, not only the individual files.
1632
1633/proc/<pid>/coredump_filter allows you to customize which memory segments
1634will be dumped when the <pid> process is dumped. coredump_filter is a bitmask
1635of memory types. If a bit of the bitmask is set, memory segments of the
1636corresponding memory type are dumped, otherwise they are not dumped.
1637
1638The following 9 memory types are supported:
1639 - (bit 0) anonymous private memory
1640 - (bit 1) anonymous shared memory
1641 - (bit 2) file-backed private memory
1642 - (bit 3) file-backed shared memory
1643 - (bit 4) ELF header pages in file-backed private memory areas (it is
1644 effective only if the bit 2 is cleared)
1645 - (bit 5) hugetlb private memory
1646 - (bit 6) hugetlb shared memory
1647 - (bit 7) DAX private memory
1648 - (bit 8) DAX shared memory
1649
1650 Note that MMIO pages such as frame buffer are never dumped and vDSO pages
1651 are always dumped regardless of the bitmask status.
1652
1653 Note that bits 0-4 don't affect hugetlb or DAX memory. hugetlb memory is
1654 only affected by bit 5-6, and DAX is only affected by bits 7-8.
1655
1656The default value of coredump_filter is 0x33; this means all anonymous memory
1657segments, ELF header pages and hugetlb private memory are dumped.
1658
1659If you don't want to dump all shared memory segments attached to pid 1234,
1660write 0x31 to the process's proc file.
1661
1662 $ echo 0x31 > /proc/1234/coredump_filter
1663
1664When a new process is created, the process inherits the bitmask status from its
1665parent. It is useful to set up coredump_filter before the program runs.
1666For example:
1667
1668 $ echo 0x7 > /proc/self/coredump_filter
1669 $ ./some_program
1670
16713.5 /proc/<pid>/mountinfo - Information about mounts
1672--------------------------------------------------------
1673
1674This file contains lines of the form:
1675
167636 35 98:0 /mnt1 /mnt2 rw,noatime master:1 - ext3 /dev/root rw,errors=continue
1677(1)(2)(3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11)
1678
1679(1) mount ID: unique identifier of the mount (may be reused after umount)
1680(2) parent ID: ID of parent (or of self for the top of the mount tree)
1681(3) major:minor: value of st_dev for files on filesystem
1682(4) root: root of the mount within the filesystem
1683(5) mount point: mount point relative to the process's root
1684(6) mount options: per mount options
1685(7) optional fields: zero or more fields of the form "tag[:value]"
1686(8) separator: marks the end of the optional fields
1687(9) filesystem type: name of filesystem of the form "type[.subtype]"
1688(10) mount source: filesystem specific information or "none"
1689(11) super options: per super block options
1690
1691Parsers should ignore all unrecognised optional fields. Currently the
1692possible optional fields are:
1693
1694shared:X mount is shared in peer group X
1695master:X mount is slave to peer group X
1696propagate_from:X mount is slave and receives propagation from peer group X (*)
1697unbindable mount is unbindable
1698
1699(*) X is the closest dominant peer group under the process's root. If
1700X is the immediate master of the mount, or if there's no dominant peer
1701group under the same root, then only the "master:X" field is present
1702and not the "propagate_from:X" field.
1703
1704For more information on mount propagation see:
1705
1706 Documentation/filesystems/sharedsubtree.txt
1707
1708
17093.6 /proc/<pid>/comm & /proc/<pid>/task/<tid>/comm
1710--------------------------------------------------------
1711These files provide a method to access a tasks comm value. It also allows for
1712a task to set its own or one of its thread siblings comm value. The comm value
1713is limited in size compared to the cmdline value, so writing anything longer
1714then the kernel's TASK_COMM_LEN (currently 16 chars) will result in a truncated
1715comm value.
1716
1717
17183.7 /proc/<pid>/task/<tid>/children - Information about task children
1719-------------------------------------------------------------------------
1720This file provides a fast way to retrieve first level children pids
1721of a task pointed by <pid>/<tid> pair. The format is a space separated
1722stream of pids.
1723
1724Note the "first level" here -- if a child has own children they will
1725not be listed here, one needs to read /proc/<children-pid>/task/<tid>/children
1726to obtain the descendants.
1727
1728Since this interface is intended to be fast and cheap it doesn't
1729guarantee to provide precise results and some children might be
1730skipped, especially if they've exited right after we printed their
1731pids, so one need to either stop or freeze processes being inspected
1732if precise results are needed.
1733
1734
17353.8 /proc/<pid>/fdinfo/<fd> - Information about opened file
1736---------------------------------------------------------------
1737This file provides information associated with an opened file. The regular
1738files have at least three fields -- 'pos', 'flags' and mnt_id. The 'pos'
1739represents the current offset of the opened file in decimal form [see lseek(2)
1740for details], 'flags' denotes the octal O_xxx mask the file has been
1741created with [see open(2) for details] and 'mnt_id' represents mount ID of
1742the file system containing the opened file [see 3.5 /proc/<pid>/mountinfo
1743for details].
1744
1745A typical output is
1746
1747 pos: 0
1748 flags: 0100002
1749 mnt_id: 19
1750
1751All locks associated with a file descriptor are shown in its fdinfo too.
1752
1753lock: 1: FLOCK ADVISORY WRITE 359 00:13:11691 0 EOF
1754
1755The files such as eventfd, fsnotify, signalfd, epoll among the regular pos/flags
1756pair provide additional information particular to the objects they represent.
1757
1758 Eventfd files
1759 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1760 pos: 0
1761 flags: 04002
1762 mnt_id: 9
1763 eventfd-count: 5a
1764
1765 where 'eventfd-count' is hex value of a counter.
1766
1767 Signalfd files
1768 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1769 pos: 0
1770 flags: 04002
1771 mnt_id: 9
1772 sigmask: 0000000000000200
1773
1774 where 'sigmask' is hex value of the signal mask associated
1775 with a file.
1776
1777 Epoll files
1778 ~~~~~~~~~~~
1779 pos: 0
1780 flags: 02
1781 mnt_id: 9
1782 tfd: 5 events: 1d data: ffffffffffffffff
1783
1784 where 'tfd' is a target file descriptor number in decimal form,
1785 'events' is events mask being watched and the 'data' is data
1786 associated with a target [see epoll(7) for more details].
1787
1788 Fsnotify files
1789 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1790 For inotify files the format is the following
1791
1792 pos: 0
1793 flags: 02000000
1794 inotify wd:3 ino:9e7e sdev:800013 mask:800afce ignored_mask:0 fhandle-bytes:8 fhandle-type:1 f_handle:7e9e0000640d1b6d
1795
1796 where 'wd' is a watch descriptor in decimal form, ie a target file
1797 descriptor number, 'ino' and 'sdev' are inode and device where the
1798 target file resides and the 'mask' is the mask of events, all in hex
1799 form [see inotify(7) for more details].
1800
1801 If the kernel was built with exportfs support, the path to the target
1802 file is encoded as a file handle. The file handle is provided by three
1803 fields 'fhandle-bytes', 'fhandle-type' and 'f_handle', all in hex
1804 format.
1805
1806 If the kernel is built without exportfs support the file handle won't be
1807 printed out.
1808
1809 If there is no inotify mark attached yet the 'inotify' line will be omitted.
1810
1811 For fanotify files the format is
1812
1813 pos: 0
1814 flags: 02
1815 mnt_id: 9
1816 fanotify flags:10 event-flags:0
1817 fanotify mnt_id:12 mflags:40 mask:38 ignored_mask:40000003
1818 fanotify ino:4f969 sdev:800013 mflags:0 mask:3b ignored_mask:40000000 fhandle-bytes:8 fhandle-type:1 f_handle:69f90400c275b5b4
1819
1820 where fanotify 'flags' and 'event-flags' are values used in fanotify_init
1821 call, 'mnt_id' is the mount point identifier, 'mflags' is the value of
1822 flags associated with mark which are tracked separately from events
1823 mask. 'ino', 'sdev' are target inode and device, 'mask' is the events
1824 mask and 'ignored_mask' is the mask of events which are to be ignored.
1825 All in hex format. Incorporation of 'mflags', 'mask' and 'ignored_mask'
1826 does provide information about flags and mask used in fanotify_mark
1827 call [see fsnotify manpage for details].
1828
1829 While the first three lines are mandatory and always printed, the rest is
1830 optional and may be omitted if no marks created yet.
1831
1832 Timerfd files
1833 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1834
1835 pos: 0
1836 flags: 02
1837 mnt_id: 9
1838 clockid: 0
1839 ticks: 0
1840 settime flags: 01
1841 it_value: (0, 49406829)
1842 it_interval: (1, 0)
1843
1844 where 'clockid' is the clock type and 'ticks' is the number of the timer expirations
1845 that have occurred [see timerfd_create(2) for details]. 'settime flags' are
1846 flags in octal form been used to setup the timer [see timerfd_settime(2) for
1847 details]. 'it_value' is remaining time until the timer exiration.
1848 'it_interval' is the interval for the timer. Note the timer might be set up
1849 with TIMER_ABSTIME option which will be shown in 'settime flags', but 'it_value'
1850 still exhibits timer's remaining time.
1851
18523.9 /proc/<pid>/map_files - Information about memory mapped files
1853---------------------------------------------------------------------
1854This directory contains symbolic links which represent memory mapped files
1855the process is maintaining. Example output:
1856
1857 | lr-------- 1 root root 64 Jan 27 11:24 333c600000-333c620000 -> /usr/lib64/ld-2.18.so
1858 | lr-------- 1 root root 64 Jan 27 11:24 333c81f000-333c820000 -> /usr/lib64/ld-2.18.so
1859 | lr-------- 1 root root 64 Jan 27 11:24 333c820000-333c821000 -> /usr/lib64/ld-2.18.so
1860 | ...
1861 | lr-------- 1 root root 64 Jan 27 11:24 35d0421000-35d0422000 -> /usr/lib64/libselinux.so.1
1862 | lr-------- 1 root root 64 Jan 27 11:24 400000-41a000 -> /usr/bin/ls
1863
1864The name of a link represents the virtual memory bounds of a mapping, i.e.
1865vm_area_struct::vm_start-vm_area_struct::vm_end.
1866
1867The main purpose of the map_files is to retrieve a set of memory mapped
1868files in a fast way instead of parsing /proc/<pid>/maps or
1869/proc/<pid>/smaps, both of which contain many more records. At the same
1870time one can open(2) mappings from the listings of two processes and
1871comparing their inode numbers to figure out which anonymous memory areas
1872are actually shared.
1873
18743.10 /proc/<pid>/timerslack_ns - Task timerslack value
1875---------------------------------------------------------
1876This file provides the value of the task's timerslack value in nanoseconds.
1877This value specifies a amount of time that normal timers may be deferred
1878in order to coalesce timers and avoid unnecessary wakeups.
1879
1880This allows a task's interactivity vs power consumption trade off to be
1881adjusted.
1882
1883Writing 0 to the file will set the tasks timerslack to the default value.
1884
1885Valid values are from 0 - ULLONG_MAX
1886
1887An application setting the value must have PTRACE_MODE_ATTACH_FSCREDS level
1888permissions on the task specified to change its timerslack_ns value.
1889
1890
1891------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1892Configuring procfs
1893------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1894
18954.1 Mount options
1896---------------------
1897
1898The following mount options are supported:
1899
1900 hidepid= Set /proc/<pid>/ access mode.
1901 gid= Set the group authorized to learn processes information.
1902
1903hidepid=0 means classic mode - everybody may access all /proc/<pid>/ directories
1904(default).
1905
1906hidepid=1 means users may not access any /proc/<pid>/ directories but their
1907own. Sensitive files like cmdline, sched*, status are now protected against
1908other users. This makes it impossible to learn whether any user runs
1909specific program (given the program doesn't reveal itself by its behaviour).
1910As an additional bonus, as /proc/<pid>/cmdline is unaccessible for other users,
1911poorly written programs passing sensitive information via program arguments are
1912now protected against local eavesdroppers.
1913
1914hidepid=2 means hidepid=1 plus all /proc/<pid>/ will be fully invisible to other
1915users. It doesn't mean that it hides a fact whether a process with a specific
1916pid value exists (it can be learned by other means, e.g. by "kill -0 $PID"),
1917but it hides process' uid and gid, which may be learned by stat()'ing
1918/proc/<pid>/ otherwise. It greatly complicates an intruder's task of gathering
1919information about running processes, whether some daemon runs with elevated
1920privileges, whether other user runs some sensitive program, whether other users
1921run any program at all, etc.
1922
1923gid= defines a group authorized to learn processes information otherwise
1924prohibited by hidepid=. If you use some daemon like identd which needs to learn
1925information about processes information, just add identd to this group.
1------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2 T H E /proc F I L E S Y S T E M
3------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4/proc/sys Terrehon Bowden <terrehon@pacbell.net> October 7 1999
5 Bodo Bauer <bb@ricochet.net>
6
72.4.x update Jorge Nerin <comandante@zaralinux.com> November 14 2000
8move /proc/sys Shen Feng <shen@cn.fujitsu.com> April 1 2009
9------------------------------------------------------------------------------
10Version 1.3 Kernel version 2.2.12
11 Kernel version 2.4.0-test11-pre4
12------------------------------------------------------------------------------
13fixes/update part 1.1 Stefani Seibold <stefani@seibold.net> June 9 2009
14
15Table of Contents
16-----------------
17
18 0 Preface
19 0.1 Introduction/Credits
20 0.2 Legal Stuff
21
22 1 Collecting System Information
23 1.1 Process-Specific Subdirectories
24 1.2 Kernel data
25 1.3 IDE devices in /proc/ide
26 1.4 Networking info in /proc/net
27 1.5 SCSI info
28 1.6 Parallel port info in /proc/parport
29 1.7 TTY info in /proc/tty
30 1.8 Miscellaneous kernel statistics in /proc/stat
31 1.9 Ext4 file system parameters
32
33 2 Modifying System Parameters
34
35 3 Per-Process Parameters
36 3.1 /proc/<pid>/oom_adj & /proc/<pid>/oom_score_adj - Adjust the oom-killer
37 score
38 3.2 /proc/<pid>/oom_score - Display current oom-killer score
39 3.3 /proc/<pid>/io - Display the IO accounting fields
40 3.4 /proc/<pid>/coredump_filter - Core dump filtering settings
41 3.5 /proc/<pid>/mountinfo - Information about mounts
42 3.6 /proc/<pid>/comm & /proc/<pid>/task/<tid>/comm
43 3.7 /proc/<pid>/task/<tid>/children - Information about task children
44
45 4 Configuring procfs
46 4.1 Mount options
47
48------------------------------------------------------------------------------
49Preface
50------------------------------------------------------------------------------
51
520.1 Introduction/Credits
53------------------------
54
55This documentation is part of a soon (or so we hope) to be released book on
56the SuSE Linux distribution. As there is no complete documentation for the
57/proc file system and we've used many freely available sources to write these
58chapters, it seems only fair to give the work back to the Linux community.
59This work is based on the 2.2.* kernel version and the upcoming 2.4.*. I'm
60afraid it's still far from complete, but we hope it will be useful. As far as
61we know, it is the first 'all-in-one' document about the /proc file system. It
62is focused on the Intel x86 hardware, so if you are looking for PPC, ARM,
63SPARC, AXP, etc., features, you probably won't find what you are looking for.
64It also only covers IPv4 networking, not IPv6 nor other protocols - sorry. But
65additions and patches are welcome and will be added to this document if you
66mail them to Bodo.
67
68We'd like to thank Alan Cox, Rik van Riel, and Alexey Kuznetsov and a lot of
69other people for help compiling this documentation. We'd also like to extend a
70special thank you to Andi Kleen for documentation, which we relied on heavily
71to create this document, as well as the additional information he provided.
72Thanks to everybody else who contributed source or docs to the Linux kernel
73and helped create a great piece of software... :)
74
75If you have any comments, corrections or additions, please don't hesitate to
76contact Bodo Bauer at bb@ricochet.net. We'll be happy to add them to this
77document.
78
79The latest version of this document is available online at
80http://tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/proc.html
81
82If the above direction does not works for you, you could try the kernel
83mailing list at linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org and/or try to reach me at
84comandante@zaralinux.com.
85
860.2 Legal Stuff
87---------------
88
89We don't guarantee the correctness of this document, and if you come to us
90complaining about how you screwed up your system because of incorrect
91documentation, we won't feel responsible...
92
93------------------------------------------------------------------------------
94CHAPTER 1: COLLECTING SYSTEM INFORMATION
95------------------------------------------------------------------------------
96
97------------------------------------------------------------------------------
98In This Chapter
99------------------------------------------------------------------------------
100* Investigating the properties of the pseudo file system /proc and its
101 ability to provide information on the running Linux system
102* Examining /proc's structure
103* Uncovering various information about the kernel and the processes running
104 on the system
105------------------------------------------------------------------------------
106
107
108The proc file system acts as an interface to internal data structures in the
109kernel. It can be used to obtain information about the system and to change
110certain kernel parameters at runtime (sysctl).
111
112First, we'll take a look at the read-only parts of /proc. In Chapter 2, we
113show you how you can use /proc/sys to change settings.
114
1151.1 Process-Specific Subdirectories
116-----------------------------------
117
118The directory /proc contains (among other things) one subdirectory for each
119process running on the system, which is named after the process ID (PID).
120
121The link self points to the process reading the file system. Each process
122subdirectory has the entries listed in Table 1-1.
123
124
125Table 1-1: Process specific entries in /proc
126..............................................................................
127 File Content
128 clear_refs Clears page referenced bits shown in smaps output
129 cmdline Command line arguments
130 cpu Current and last cpu in which it was executed (2.4)(smp)
131 cwd Link to the current working directory
132 environ Values of environment variables
133 exe Link to the executable of this process
134 fd Directory, which contains all file descriptors
135 maps Memory maps to executables and library files (2.4)
136 mem Memory held by this process
137 root Link to the root directory of this process
138 stat Process status
139 statm Process memory status information
140 status Process status in human readable form
141 wchan If CONFIG_KALLSYMS is set, a pre-decoded wchan
142 pagemap Page table
143 stack Report full stack trace, enable via CONFIG_STACKTRACE
144 smaps a extension based on maps, showing the memory consumption of
145 each mapping
146..............................................................................
147
148For example, to get the status information of a process, all you have to do is
149read the file /proc/PID/status:
150
151 >cat /proc/self/status
152 Name: cat
153 State: R (running)
154 Tgid: 5452
155 Pid: 5452
156 PPid: 743
157 TracerPid: 0 (2.4)
158 Uid: 501 501 501 501
159 Gid: 100 100 100 100
160 FDSize: 256
161 Groups: 100 14 16
162 VmPeak: 5004 kB
163 VmSize: 5004 kB
164 VmLck: 0 kB
165 VmHWM: 476 kB
166 VmRSS: 476 kB
167 VmData: 156 kB
168 VmStk: 88 kB
169 VmExe: 68 kB
170 VmLib: 1412 kB
171 VmPTE: 20 kb
172 VmSwap: 0 kB
173 Threads: 1
174 SigQ: 0/28578
175 SigPnd: 0000000000000000
176 ShdPnd: 0000000000000000
177 SigBlk: 0000000000000000
178 SigIgn: 0000000000000000
179 SigCgt: 0000000000000000
180 CapInh: 00000000fffffeff
181 CapPrm: 0000000000000000
182 CapEff: 0000000000000000
183 CapBnd: ffffffffffffffff
184 voluntary_ctxt_switches: 0
185 nonvoluntary_ctxt_switches: 1
186
187This shows you nearly the same information you would get if you viewed it with
188the ps command. In fact, ps uses the proc file system to obtain its
189information. But you get a more detailed view of the process by reading the
190file /proc/PID/status. It fields are described in table 1-2.
191
192The statm file contains more detailed information about the process
193memory usage. Its seven fields are explained in Table 1-3. The stat file
194contains details information about the process itself. Its fields are
195explained in Table 1-4.
196
197(for SMP CONFIG users)
198For making accounting scalable, RSS related information are handled in
199asynchronous manner and the vaule may not be very precise. To see a precise
200snapshot of a moment, you can see /proc/<pid>/smaps file and scan page table.
201It's slow but very precise.
202
203Table 1-2: Contents of the status files (as of 2.6.30-rc7)
204..............................................................................
205 Field Content
206 Name filename of the executable
207 State state (R is running, S is sleeping, D is sleeping
208 in an uninterruptible wait, Z is zombie,
209 T is traced or stopped)
210 Tgid thread group ID
211 Pid process id
212 PPid process id of the parent process
213 TracerPid PID of process tracing this process (0 if not)
214 Uid Real, effective, saved set, and file system UIDs
215 Gid Real, effective, saved set, and file system GIDs
216 FDSize number of file descriptor slots currently allocated
217 Groups supplementary group list
218 VmPeak peak virtual memory size
219 VmSize total program size
220 VmLck locked memory size
221 VmHWM peak resident set size ("high water mark")
222 VmRSS size of memory portions
223 VmData size of data, stack, and text segments
224 VmStk size of data, stack, and text segments
225 VmExe size of text segment
226 VmLib size of shared library code
227 VmPTE size of page table entries
228 VmSwap size of swap usage (the number of referred swapents)
229 Threads number of threads
230 SigQ number of signals queued/max. number for queue
231 SigPnd bitmap of pending signals for the thread
232 ShdPnd bitmap of shared pending signals for the process
233 SigBlk bitmap of blocked signals
234 SigIgn bitmap of ignored signals
235 SigCgt bitmap of catched signals
236 CapInh bitmap of inheritable capabilities
237 CapPrm bitmap of permitted capabilities
238 CapEff bitmap of effective capabilities
239 CapBnd bitmap of capabilities bounding set
240 Cpus_allowed mask of CPUs on which this process may run
241 Cpus_allowed_list Same as previous, but in "list format"
242 Mems_allowed mask of memory nodes allowed to this process
243 Mems_allowed_list Same as previous, but in "list format"
244 voluntary_ctxt_switches number of voluntary context switches
245 nonvoluntary_ctxt_switches number of non voluntary context switches
246..............................................................................
247
248Table 1-3: Contents of the statm files (as of 2.6.8-rc3)
249..............................................................................
250 Field Content
251 size total program size (pages) (same as VmSize in status)
252 resident size of memory portions (pages) (same as VmRSS in status)
253 shared number of pages that are shared (i.e. backed by a file)
254 trs number of pages that are 'code' (not including libs; broken,
255 includes data segment)
256 lrs number of pages of library (always 0 on 2.6)
257 drs number of pages of data/stack (including libs; broken,
258 includes library text)
259 dt number of dirty pages (always 0 on 2.6)
260..............................................................................
261
262
263Table 1-4: Contents of the stat files (as of 2.6.30-rc7)
264..............................................................................
265 Field Content
266 pid process id
267 tcomm filename of the executable
268 state state (R is running, S is sleeping, D is sleeping in an
269 uninterruptible wait, Z is zombie, T is traced or stopped)
270 ppid process id of the parent process
271 pgrp pgrp of the process
272 sid session id
273 tty_nr tty the process uses
274 tty_pgrp pgrp of the tty
275 flags task flags
276 min_flt number of minor faults
277 cmin_flt number of minor faults with child's
278 maj_flt number of major faults
279 cmaj_flt number of major faults with child's
280 utime user mode jiffies
281 stime kernel mode jiffies
282 cutime user mode jiffies with child's
283 cstime kernel mode jiffies with child's
284 priority priority level
285 nice nice level
286 num_threads number of threads
287 it_real_value (obsolete, always 0)
288 start_time time the process started after system boot
289 vsize virtual memory size
290 rss resident set memory size
291 rsslim current limit in bytes on the rss
292 start_code address above which program text can run
293 end_code address below which program text can run
294 start_stack address of the start of the main process stack
295 esp current value of ESP
296 eip current value of EIP
297 pending bitmap of pending signals
298 blocked bitmap of blocked signals
299 sigign bitmap of ignored signals
300 sigcatch bitmap of catched signals
301 wchan address where process went to sleep
302 0 (place holder)
303 0 (place holder)
304 exit_signal signal to send to parent thread on exit
305 task_cpu which CPU the task is scheduled on
306 rt_priority realtime priority
307 policy scheduling policy (man sched_setscheduler)
308 blkio_ticks time spent waiting for block IO
309 gtime guest time of the task in jiffies
310 cgtime guest time of the task children in jiffies
311 start_data address above which program data+bss is placed
312 end_data address below which program data+bss is placed
313 start_brk address above which program heap can be expanded with brk()
314 arg_start address above which program command line is placed
315 arg_end address below which program command line is placed
316 env_start address above which program environment is placed
317 env_end address below which program environment is placed
318 exit_code the thread's exit_code in the form reported by the waitpid system call
319..............................................................................
320
321The /proc/PID/maps file containing the currently mapped memory regions and
322their access permissions.
323
324The format is:
325
326address perms offset dev inode pathname
327
32808048000-08049000 r-xp 00000000 03:00 8312 /opt/test
32908049000-0804a000 rw-p 00001000 03:00 8312 /opt/test
3300804a000-0806b000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 [heap]
331a7cb1000-a7cb2000 ---p 00000000 00:00 0
332a7cb2000-a7eb2000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
333a7eb2000-a7eb3000 ---p 00000000 00:00 0
334a7eb3000-a7ed5000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 [stack:1001]
335a7ed5000-a8008000 r-xp 00000000 03:00 4222 /lib/libc.so.6
336a8008000-a800a000 r--p 00133000 03:00 4222 /lib/libc.so.6
337a800a000-a800b000 rw-p 00135000 03:00 4222 /lib/libc.so.6
338a800b000-a800e000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
339a800e000-a8022000 r-xp 00000000 03:00 14462 /lib/libpthread.so.0
340a8022000-a8023000 r--p 00013000 03:00 14462 /lib/libpthread.so.0
341a8023000-a8024000 rw-p 00014000 03:00 14462 /lib/libpthread.so.0
342a8024000-a8027000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
343a8027000-a8043000 r-xp 00000000 03:00 8317 /lib/ld-linux.so.2
344a8043000-a8044000 r--p 0001b000 03:00 8317 /lib/ld-linux.so.2
345a8044000-a8045000 rw-p 0001c000 03:00 8317 /lib/ld-linux.so.2
346aff35000-aff4a000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 [stack]
347ffffe000-fffff000 r-xp 00000000 00:00 0 [vdso]
348
349where "address" is the address space in the process that it occupies, "perms"
350is a set of permissions:
351
352 r = read
353 w = write
354 x = execute
355 s = shared
356 p = private (copy on write)
357
358"offset" is the offset into the mapping, "dev" is the device (major:minor), and
359"inode" is the inode on that device. 0 indicates that no inode is associated
360with the memory region, as the case would be with BSS (uninitialized data).
361The "pathname" shows the name associated file for this mapping. If the mapping
362is not associated with a file:
363
364 [heap] = the heap of the program
365 [stack] = the stack of the main process
366 [stack:1001] = the stack of the thread with tid 1001
367 [vdso] = the "virtual dynamic shared object",
368 the kernel system call handler
369
370 or if empty, the mapping is anonymous.
371
372The /proc/PID/task/TID/maps is a view of the virtual memory from the viewpoint
373of the individual tasks of a process. In this file you will see a mapping marked
374as [stack] if that task sees it as a stack. This is a key difference from the
375content of /proc/PID/maps, where you will see all mappings that are being used
376as stack by all of those tasks. Hence, for the example above, the task-level
377map, i.e. /proc/PID/task/TID/maps for thread 1001 will look like this:
378
37908048000-08049000 r-xp 00000000 03:00 8312 /opt/test
38008049000-0804a000 rw-p 00001000 03:00 8312 /opt/test
3810804a000-0806b000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 [heap]
382a7cb1000-a7cb2000 ---p 00000000 00:00 0
383a7cb2000-a7eb2000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
384a7eb2000-a7eb3000 ---p 00000000 00:00 0
385a7eb3000-a7ed5000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 [stack]
386a7ed5000-a8008000 r-xp 00000000 03:00 4222 /lib/libc.so.6
387a8008000-a800a000 r--p 00133000 03:00 4222 /lib/libc.so.6
388a800a000-a800b000 rw-p 00135000 03:00 4222 /lib/libc.so.6
389a800b000-a800e000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
390a800e000-a8022000 r-xp 00000000 03:00 14462 /lib/libpthread.so.0
391a8022000-a8023000 r--p 00013000 03:00 14462 /lib/libpthread.so.0
392a8023000-a8024000 rw-p 00014000 03:00 14462 /lib/libpthread.so.0
393a8024000-a8027000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
394a8027000-a8043000 r-xp 00000000 03:00 8317 /lib/ld-linux.so.2
395a8043000-a8044000 r--p 0001b000 03:00 8317 /lib/ld-linux.so.2
396a8044000-a8045000 rw-p 0001c000 03:00 8317 /lib/ld-linux.so.2
397aff35000-aff4a000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
398ffffe000-fffff000 r-xp 00000000 00:00 0 [vdso]
399
400The /proc/PID/smaps is an extension based on maps, showing the memory
401consumption for each of the process's mappings. For each of mappings there
402is a series of lines such as the following:
403
40408048000-080bc000 r-xp 00000000 03:02 13130 /bin/bash
405Size: 1084 kB
406Rss: 892 kB
407Pss: 374 kB
408Shared_Clean: 892 kB
409Shared_Dirty: 0 kB
410Private_Clean: 0 kB
411Private_Dirty: 0 kB
412Referenced: 892 kB
413Anonymous: 0 kB
414Swap: 0 kB
415KernelPageSize: 4 kB
416MMUPageSize: 4 kB
417Locked: 374 kB
418
419The first of these lines shows the same information as is displayed for the
420mapping in /proc/PID/maps. The remaining lines show the size of the mapping
421(size), the amount of the mapping that is currently resident in RAM (RSS), the
422process' proportional share of this mapping (PSS), the number of clean and
423dirty private pages in the mapping. Note that even a page which is part of a
424MAP_SHARED mapping, but has only a single pte mapped, i.e. is currently used
425by only one process, is accounted as private and not as shared. "Referenced"
426indicates the amount of memory currently marked as referenced or accessed.
427"Anonymous" shows the amount of memory that does not belong to any file. Even
428a mapping associated with a file may contain anonymous pages: when MAP_PRIVATE
429and a page is modified, the file page is replaced by a private anonymous copy.
430"Swap" shows how much would-be-anonymous memory is also used, but out on
431swap.
432
433This file is only present if the CONFIG_MMU kernel configuration option is
434enabled.
435
436The /proc/PID/clear_refs is used to reset the PG_Referenced and ACCESSED/YOUNG
437bits on both physical and virtual pages associated with a process.
438To clear the bits for all the pages associated with the process
439 > echo 1 > /proc/PID/clear_refs
440
441To clear the bits for the anonymous pages associated with the process
442 > echo 2 > /proc/PID/clear_refs
443
444To clear the bits for the file mapped pages associated with the process
445 > echo 3 > /proc/PID/clear_refs
446Any other value written to /proc/PID/clear_refs will have no effect.
447
448The /proc/pid/pagemap gives the PFN, which can be used to find the pageflags
449using /proc/kpageflags and number of times a page is mapped using
450/proc/kpagecount. For detailed explanation, see Documentation/vm/pagemap.txt.
451
4521.2 Kernel data
453---------------
454
455Similar to the process entries, the kernel data files give information about
456the running kernel. The files used to obtain this information are contained in
457/proc and are listed in Table 1-5. Not all of these will be present in your
458system. It depends on the kernel configuration and the loaded modules, which
459files are there, and which are missing.
460
461Table 1-5: Kernel info in /proc
462..............................................................................
463 File Content
464 apm Advanced power management info
465 buddyinfo Kernel memory allocator information (see text) (2.5)
466 bus Directory containing bus specific information
467 cmdline Kernel command line
468 cpuinfo Info about the CPU
469 devices Available devices (block and character)
470 dma Used DMS channels
471 filesystems Supported filesystems
472 driver Various drivers grouped here, currently rtc (2.4)
473 execdomains Execdomains, related to security (2.4)
474 fb Frame Buffer devices (2.4)
475 fs File system parameters, currently nfs/exports (2.4)
476 ide Directory containing info about the IDE subsystem
477 interrupts Interrupt usage
478 iomem Memory map (2.4)
479 ioports I/O port usage
480 irq Masks for irq to cpu affinity (2.4)(smp?)
481 isapnp ISA PnP (Plug&Play) Info (2.4)
482 kcore Kernel core image (can be ELF or A.OUT(deprecated in 2.4))
483 kmsg Kernel messages
484 ksyms Kernel symbol table
485 loadavg Load average of last 1, 5 & 15 minutes
486 locks Kernel locks
487 meminfo Memory info
488 misc Miscellaneous
489 modules List of loaded modules
490 mounts Mounted filesystems
491 net Networking info (see text)
492 pagetypeinfo Additional page allocator information (see text) (2.5)
493 partitions Table of partitions known to the system
494 pci Deprecated info of PCI bus (new way -> /proc/bus/pci/,
495 decoupled by lspci (2.4)
496 rtc Real time clock
497 scsi SCSI info (see text)
498 slabinfo Slab pool info
499 softirqs softirq usage
500 stat Overall statistics
501 swaps Swap space utilization
502 sys See chapter 2
503 sysvipc Info of SysVIPC Resources (msg, sem, shm) (2.4)
504 tty Info of tty drivers
505 uptime System uptime
506 version Kernel version
507 video bttv info of video resources (2.4)
508 vmallocinfo Show vmalloced areas
509..............................................................................
510
511You can, for example, check which interrupts are currently in use and what
512they are used for by looking in the file /proc/interrupts:
513
514 > cat /proc/interrupts
515 CPU0
516 0: 8728810 XT-PIC timer
517 1: 895 XT-PIC keyboard
518 2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
519 3: 531695 XT-PIC aha152x
520 4: 2014133 XT-PIC serial
521 5: 44401 XT-PIC pcnet_cs
522 8: 2 XT-PIC rtc
523 11: 8 XT-PIC i82365
524 12: 182918 XT-PIC PS/2 Mouse
525 13: 1 XT-PIC fpu
526 14: 1232265 XT-PIC ide0
527 15: 7 XT-PIC ide1
528 NMI: 0
529
530In 2.4.* a couple of lines where added to this file LOC & ERR (this time is the
531output of a SMP machine):
532
533 > cat /proc/interrupts
534
535 CPU0 CPU1
536 0: 1243498 1214548 IO-APIC-edge timer
537 1: 8949 8958 IO-APIC-edge keyboard
538 2: 0 0 XT-PIC cascade
539 5: 11286 10161 IO-APIC-edge soundblaster
540 8: 1 0 IO-APIC-edge rtc
541 9: 27422 27407 IO-APIC-edge 3c503
542 12: 113645 113873 IO-APIC-edge PS/2 Mouse
543 13: 0 0 XT-PIC fpu
544 14: 22491 24012 IO-APIC-edge ide0
545 15: 2183 2415 IO-APIC-edge ide1
546 17: 30564 30414 IO-APIC-level eth0
547 18: 177 164 IO-APIC-level bttv
548 NMI: 2457961 2457959
549 LOC: 2457882 2457881
550 ERR: 2155
551
552NMI is incremented in this case because every timer interrupt generates a NMI
553(Non Maskable Interrupt) which is used by the NMI Watchdog to detect lockups.
554
555LOC is the local interrupt counter of the internal APIC of every CPU.
556
557ERR is incremented in the case of errors in the IO-APIC bus (the bus that
558connects the CPUs in a SMP system. This means that an error has been detected,
559the IO-APIC automatically retry the transmission, so it should not be a big
560problem, but you should read the SMP-FAQ.
561
562In 2.6.2* /proc/interrupts was expanded again. This time the goal was for
563/proc/interrupts to display every IRQ vector in use by the system, not
564just those considered 'most important'. The new vectors are:
565
566 THR -- interrupt raised when a machine check threshold counter
567 (typically counting ECC corrected errors of memory or cache) exceeds
568 a configurable threshold. Only available on some systems.
569
570 TRM -- a thermal event interrupt occurs when a temperature threshold
571 has been exceeded for the CPU. This interrupt may also be generated
572 when the temperature drops back to normal.
573
574 SPU -- a spurious interrupt is some interrupt that was raised then lowered
575 by some IO device before it could be fully processed by the APIC. Hence
576 the APIC sees the interrupt but does not know what device it came from.
577 For this case the APIC will generate the interrupt with a IRQ vector
578 of 0xff. This might also be generated by chipset bugs.
579
580 RES, CAL, TLB -- rescheduling, call and TLB flush interrupts are
581 sent from one CPU to another per the needs of the OS. Typically,
582 their statistics are used by kernel developers and interested users to
583 determine the occurrence of interrupts of the given type.
584
585The above IRQ vectors are displayed only when relevant. For example,
586the threshold vector does not exist on x86_64 platforms. Others are
587suppressed when the system is a uniprocessor. As of this writing, only
588i386 and x86_64 platforms support the new IRQ vector displays.
589
590Of some interest is the introduction of the /proc/irq directory to 2.4.
591It could be used to set IRQ to CPU affinity, this means that you can "hook" an
592IRQ to only one CPU, or to exclude a CPU of handling IRQs. The contents of the
593irq subdir is one subdir for each IRQ, and two files; default_smp_affinity and
594prof_cpu_mask.
595
596For example
597 > ls /proc/irq/
598 0 10 12 14 16 18 2 4 6 8 prof_cpu_mask
599 1 11 13 15 17 19 3 5 7 9 default_smp_affinity
600 > ls /proc/irq/0/
601 smp_affinity
602
603smp_affinity is a bitmask, in which you can specify which CPUs can handle the
604IRQ, you can set it by doing:
605
606 > echo 1 > /proc/irq/10/smp_affinity
607
608This means that only the first CPU will handle the IRQ, but you can also echo
6095 which means that only the first and fourth CPU can handle the IRQ.
610
611The contents of each smp_affinity file is the same by default:
612
613 > cat /proc/irq/0/smp_affinity
614 ffffffff
615
616There is an alternate interface, smp_affinity_list which allows specifying
617a cpu range instead of a bitmask:
618
619 > cat /proc/irq/0/smp_affinity_list
620 1024-1031
621
622The default_smp_affinity mask applies to all non-active IRQs, which are the
623IRQs which have not yet been allocated/activated, and hence which lack a
624/proc/irq/[0-9]* directory.
625
626The node file on an SMP system shows the node to which the device using the IRQ
627reports itself as being attached. This hardware locality information does not
628include information about any possible driver locality preference.
629
630prof_cpu_mask specifies which CPUs are to be profiled by the system wide
631profiler. Default value is ffffffff (all cpus if there are only 32 of them).
632
633The way IRQs are routed is handled by the IO-APIC, and it's Round Robin
634between all the CPUs which are allowed to handle it. As usual the kernel has
635more info than you and does a better job than you, so the defaults are the
636best choice for almost everyone. [Note this applies only to those IO-APIC's
637that support "Round Robin" interrupt distribution.]
638
639There are three more important subdirectories in /proc: net, scsi, and sys.
640The general rule is that the contents, or even the existence of these
641directories, depend on your kernel configuration. If SCSI is not enabled, the
642directory scsi may not exist. The same is true with the net, which is there
643only when networking support is present in the running kernel.
644
645The slabinfo file gives information about memory usage at the slab level.
646Linux uses slab pools for memory management above page level in version 2.2.
647Commonly used objects have their own slab pool (such as network buffers,
648directory cache, and so on).
649
650..............................................................................
651
652> cat /proc/buddyinfo
653
654Node 0, zone DMA 0 4 5 4 4 3 ...
655Node 0, zone Normal 1 0 0 1 101 8 ...
656Node 0, zone HighMem 2 0 0 1 1 0 ...
657
658External fragmentation is a problem under some workloads, and buddyinfo is a
659useful tool for helping diagnose these problems. Buddyinfo will give you a
660clue as to how big an area you can safely allocate, or why a previous
661allocation failed.
662
663Each column represents the number of pages of a certain order which are
664available. In this case, there are 0 chunks of 2^0*PAGE_SIZE available in
665ZONE_DMA, 4 chunks of 2^1*PAGE_SIZE in ZONE_DMA, 101 chunks of 2^4*PAGE_SIZE
666available in ZONE_NORMAL, etc...
667
668More information relevant to external fragmentation can be found in
669pagetypeinfo.
670
671> cat /proc/pagetypeinfo
672Page block order: 9
673Pages per block: 512
674
675Free pages count per migrate type at order 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
676Node 0, zone DMA, type Unmovable 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0
677Node 0, zone DMA, type Reclaimable 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
678Node 0, zone DMA, type Movable 1 1 2 1 2 1 1 0 1 0 2
679Node 0, zone DMA, type Reserve 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0
680Node 0, zone DMA, type Isolate 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
681Node 0, zone DMA32, type Unmovable 103 54 77 1 1 1 11 8 7 1 9
682Node 0, zone DMA32, type Reclaimable 0 0 2 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0
683Node 0, zone DMA32, type Movable 169 152 113 91 77 54 39 13 6 1 452
684Node 0, zone DMA32, type Reserve 1 2 2 2 2 0 1 1 1 1 0
685Node 0, zone DMA32, type Isolate 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
686
687Number of blocks type Unmovable Reclaimable Movable Reserve Isolate
688Node 0, zone DMA 2 0 5 1 0
689Node 0, zone DMA32 41 6 967 2 0
690
691Fragmentation avoidance in the kernel works by grouping pages of different
692migrate types into the same contiguous regions of memory called page blocks.
693A page block is typically the size of the default hugepage size e.g. 2MB on
694X86-64. By keeping pages grouped based on their ability to move, the kernel
695can reclaim pages within a page block to satisfy a high-order allocation.
696
697The pagetypinfo begins with information on the size of a page block. It
698then gives the same type of information as buddyinfo except broken down
699by migrate-type and finishes with details on how many page blocks of each
700type exist.
701
702If min_free_kbytes has been tuned correctly (recommendations made by hugeadm
703from libhugetlbfs http://sourceforge.net/projects/libhugetlbfs/), one can
704make an estimate of the likely number of huge pages that can be allocated
705at a given point in time. All the "Movable" blocks should be allocatable
706unless memory has been mlock()'d. Some of the Reclaimable blocks should
707also be allocatable although a lot of filesystem metadata may have to be
708reclaimed to achieve this.
709
710..............................................................................
711
712meminfo:
713
714Provides information about distribution and utilization of memory. This
715varies by architecture and compile options. The following is from a
71616GB PIII, which has highmem enabled. You may not have all of these fields.
717
718> cat /proc/meminfo
719
720The "Locked" indicates whether the mapping is locked in memory or not.
721
722
723MemTotal: 16344972 kB
724MemFree: 13634064 kB
725Buffers: 3656 kB
726Cached: 1195708 kB
727SwapCached: 0 kB
728Active: 891636 kB
729Inactive: 1077224 kB
730HighTotal: 15597528 kB
731HighFree: 13629632 kB
732LowTotal: 747444 kB
733LowFree: 4432 kB
734SwapTotal: 0 kB
735SwapFree: 0 kB
736Dirty: 968 kB
737Writeback: 0 kB
738AnonPages: 861800 kB
739Mapped: 280372 kB
740Slab: 284364 kB
741SReclaimable: 159856 kB
742SUnreclaim: 124508 kB
743PageTables: 24448 kB
744NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
745Bounce: 0 kB
746WritebackTmp: 0 kB
747CommitLimit: 7669796 kB
748Committed_AS: 100056 kB
749VmallocTotal: 112216 kB
750VmallocUsed: 428 kB
751VmallocChunk: 111088 kB
752AnonHugePages: 49152 kB
753
754 MemTotal: Total usable ram (i.e. physical ram minus a few reserved
755 bits and the kernel binary code)
756 MemFree: The sum of LowFree+HighFree
757 Buffers: Relatively temporary storage for raw disk blocks
758 shouldn't get tremendously large (20MB or so)
759 Cached: in-memory cache for files read from the disk (the
760 pagecache). Doesn't include SwapCached
761 SwapCached: Memory that once was swapped out, is swapped back in but
762 still also is in the swapfile (if memory is needed it
763 doesn't need to be swapped out AGAIN because it is already
764 in the swapfile. This saves I/O)
765 Active: Memory that has been used more recently and usually not
766 reclaimed unless absolutely necessary.
767 Inactive: Memory which has been less recently used. It is more
768 eligible to be reclaimed for other purposes
769 HighTotal:
770 HighFree: Highmem is all memory above ~860MB of physical memory
771 Highmem areas are for use by userspace programs, or
772 for the pagecache. The kernel must use tricks to access
773 this memory, making it slower to access than lowmem.
774 LowTotal:
775 LowFree: Lowmem is memory which can be used for everything that
776 highmem can be used for, but it is also available for the
777 kernel's use for its own data structures. Among many
778 other things, it is where everything from the Slab is
779 allocated. Bad things happen when you're out of lowmem.
780 SwapTotal: total amount of swap space available
781 SwapFree: Memory which has been evicted from RAM, and is temporarily
782 on the disk
783 Dirty: Memory which is waiting to get written back to the disk
784 Writeback: Memory which is actively being written back to the disk
785 AnonPages: Non-file backed pages mapped into userspace page tables
786AnonHugePages: Non-file backed huge pages mapped into userspace page tables
787 Mapped: files which have been mmaped, such as libraries
788 Slab: in-kernel data structures cache
789SReclaimable: Part of Slab, that might be reclaimed, such as caches
790 SUnreclaim: Part of Slab, that cannot be reclaimed on memory pressure
791 PageTables: amount of memory dedicated to the lowest level of page
792 tables.
793NFS_Unstable: NFS pages sent to the server, but not yet committed to stable
794 storage
795 Bounce: Memory used for block device "bounce buffers"
796WritebackTmp: Memory used by FUSE for temporary writeback buffers
797 CommitLimit: Based on the overcommit ratio ('vm.overcommit_ratio'),
798 this is the total amount of memory currently available to
799 be allocated on the system. This limit is only adhered to
800 if strict overcommit accounting is enabled (mode 2 in
801 'vm.overcommit_memory').
802 The CommitLimit is calculated with the following formula:
803 CommitLimit = ('vm.overcommit_ratio' * Physical RAM) + Swap
804 For example, on a system with 1G of physical RAM and 7G
805 of swap with a `vm.overcommit_ratio` of 30 it would
806 yield a CommitLimit of 7.3G.
807 For more details, see the memory overcommit documentation
808 in vm/overcommit-accounting.
809Committed_AS: The amount of memory presently allocated on the system.
810 The committed memory is a sum of all of the memory which
811 has been allocated by processes, even if it has not been
812 "used" by them as of yet. A process which malloc()'s 1G
813 of memory, but only touches 300M of it will only show up
814 as using 300M of memory even if it has the address space
815 allocated for the entire 1G. This 1G is memory which has
816 been "committed" to by the VM and can be used at any time
817 by the allocating application. With strict overcommit
818 enabled on the system (mode 2 in 'vm.overcommit_memory'),
819 allocations which would exceed the CommitLimit (detailed
820 above) will not be permitted. This is useful if one needs
821 to guarantee that processes will not fail due to lack of
822 memory once that memory has been successfully allocated.
823VmallocTotal: total size of vmalloc memory area
824 VmallocUsed: amount of vmalloc area which is used
825VmallocChunk: largest contiguous block of vmalloc area which is free
826
827..............................................................................
828
829vmallocinfo:
830
831Provides information about vmalloced/vmaped areas. One line per area,
832containing the virtual address range of the area, size in bytes,
833caller information of the creator, and optional information depending
834on the kind of area :
835
836 pages=nr number of pages
837 phys=addr if a physical address was specified
838 ioremap I/O mapping (ioremap() and friends)
839 vmalloc vmalloc() area
840 vmap vmap()ed pages
841 user VM_USERMAP area
842 vpages buffer for pages pointers was vmalloced (huge area)
843 N<node>=nr (Only on NUMA kernels)
844 Number of pages allocated on memory node <node>
845
846> cat /proc/vmallocinfo
8470xffffc20000000000-0xffffc20000201000 2101248 alloc_large_system_hash+0x204 ...
848 /0x2c0 pages=512 vmalloc N0=128 N1=128 N2=128 N3=128
8490xffffc20000201000-0xffffc20000302000 1052672 alloc_large_system_hash+0x204 ...
850 /0x2c0 pages=256 vmalloc N0=64 N1=64 N2=64 N3=64
8510xffffc20000302000-0xffffc20000304000 8192 acpi_tb_verify_table+0x21/0x4f...
852 phys=7fee8000 ioremap
8530xffffc20000304000-0xffffc20000307000 12288 acpi_tb_verify_table+0x21/0x4f...
854 phys=7fee7000 ioremap
8550xffffc2000031d000-0xffffc2000031f000 8192 init_vdso_vars+0x112/0x210
8560xffffc2000031f000-0xffffc2000032b000 49152 cramfs_uncompress_init+0x2e ...
857 /0x80 pages=11 vmalloc N0=3 N1=3 N2=2 N3=3
8580xffffc2000033a000-0xffffc2000033d000 12288 sys_swapon+0x640/0xac0 ...
859 pages=2 vmalloc N1=2
8600xffffc20000347000-0xffffc2000034c000 20480 xt_alloc_table_info+0xfe ...
861 /0x130 [x_tables] pages=4 vmalloc N0=4
8620xffffffffa0000000-0xffffffffa000f000 61440 sys_init_module+0xc27/0x1d00 ...
863 pages=14 vmalloc N2=14
8640xffffffffa000f000-0xffffffffa0014000 20480 sys_init_module+0xc27/0x1d00 ...
865 pages=4 vmalloc N1=4
8660xffffffffa0014000-0xffffffffa0017000 12288 sys_init_module+0xc27/0x1d00 ...
867 pages=2 vmalloc N1=2
8680xffffffffa0017000-0xffffffffa0022000 45056 sys_init_module+0xc27/0x1d00 ...
869 pages=10 vmalloc N0=10
870
871..............................................................................
872
873softirqs:
874
875Provides counts of softirq handlers serviced since boot time, for each cpu.
876
877> cat /proc/softirqs
878 CPU0 CPU1 CPU2 CPU3
879 HI: 0 0 0 0
880 TIMER: 27166 27120 27097 27034
881 NET_TX: 0 0 0 17
882 NET_RX: 42 0 0 39
883 BLOCK: 0 0 107 1121
884 TASKLET: 0 0 0 290
885 SCHED: 27035 26983 26971 26746
886 HRTIMER: 0 0 0 0
887 RCU: 1678 1769 2178 2250
888
889
8901.3 IDE devices in /proc/ide
891----------------------------
892
893The subdirectory /proc/ide contains information about all IDE devices of which
894the kernel is aware. There is one subdirectory for each IDE controller, the
895file drivers and a link for each IDE device, pointing to the device directory
896in the controller specific subtree.
897
898The file drivers contains general information about the drivers used for the
899IDE devices:
900
901 > cat /proc/ide/drivers
902 ide-cdrom version 4.53
903 ide-disk version 1.08
904
905More detailed information can be found in the controller specific
906subdirectories. These are named ide0, ide1 and so on. Each of these
907directories contains the files shown in table 1-6.
908
909
910Table 1-6: IDE controller info in /proc/ide/ide?
911..............................................................................
912 File Content
913 channel IDE channel (0 or 1)
914 config Configuration (only for PCI/IDE bridge)
915 mate Mate name
916 model Type/Chipset of IDE controller
917..............................................................................
918
919Each device connected to a controller has a separate subdirectory in the
920controllers directory. The files listed in table 1-7 are contained in these
921directories.
922
923
924Table 1-7: IDE device information
925..............................................................................
926 File Content
927 cache The cache
928 capacity Capacity of the medium (in 512Byte blocks)
929 driver driver and version
930 geometry physical and logical geometry
931 identify device identify block
932 media media type
933 model device identifier
934 settings device setup
935 smart_thresholds IDE disk management thresholds
936 smart_values IDE disk management values
937..............................................................................
938
939The most interesting file is settings. This file contains a nice overview of
940the drive parameters:
941
942 # cat /proc/ide/ide0/hda/settings
943 name value min max mode
944 ---- ----- --- --- ----
945 bios_cyl 526 0 65535 rw
946 bios_head 255 0 255 rw
947 bios_sect 63 0 63 rw
948 breada_readahead 4 0 127 rw
949 bswap 0 0 1 r
950 file_readahead 72 0 2097151 rw
951 io_32bit 0 0 3 rw
952 keepsettings 0 0 1 rw
953 max_kb_per_request 122 1 127 rw
954 multcount 0 0 8 rw
955 nice1 1 0 1 rw
956 nowerr 0 0 1 rw
957 pio_mode write-only 0 255 w
958 slow 0 0 1 rw
959 unmaskirq 0 0 1 rw
960 using_dma 0 0 1 rw
961
962
9631.4 Networking info in /proc/net
964--------------------------------
965
966The subdirectory /proc/net follows the usual pattern. Table 1-8 shows the
967additional values you get for IP version 6 if you configure the kernel to
968support this. Table 1-9 lists the files and their meaning.
969
970
971Table 1-8: IPv6 info in /proc/net
972..............................................................................
973 File Content
974 udp6 UDP sockets (IPv6)
975 tcp6 TCP sockets (IPv6)
976 raw6 Raw device statistics (IPv6)
977 igmp6 IP multicast addresses, which this host joined (IPv6)
978 if_inet6 List of IPv6 interface addresses
979 ipv6_route Kernel routing table for IPv6
980 rt6_stats Global IPv6 routing tables statistics
981 sockstat6 Socket statistics (IPv6)
982 snmp6 Snmp data (IPv6)
983..............................................................................
984
985
986Table 1-9: Network info in /proc/net
987..............................................................................
988 File Content
989 arp Kernel ARP table
990 dev network devices with statistics
991 dev_mcast the Layer2 multicast groups a device is listening too
992 (interface index, label, number of references, number of bound
993 addresses).
994 dev_stat network device status
995 ip_fwchains Firewall chain linkage
996 ip_fwnames Firewall chain names
997 ip_masq Directory containing the masquerading tables
998 ip_masquerade Major masquerading table
999 netstat Network statistics
1000 raw raw device statistics
1001 route Kernel routing table
1002 rpc Directory containing rpc info
1003 rt_cache Routing cache
1004 snmp SNMP data
1005 sockstat Socket statistics
1006 tcp TCP sockets
1007 udp UDP sockets
1008 unix UNIX domain sockets
1009 wireless Wireless interface data (Wavelan etc)
1010 igmp IP multicast addresses, which this host joined
1011 psched Global packet scheduler parameters.
1012 netlink List of PF_NETLINK sockets
1013 ip_mr_vifs List of multicast virtual interfaces
1014 ip_mr_cache List of multicast routing cache
1015..............................................................................
1016
1017You can use this information to see which network devices are available in
1018your system and how much traffic was routed over those devices:
1019
1020 > cat /proc/net/dev
1021 Inter-|Receive |[...
1022 face |bytes packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast|[...
1023 lo: 908188 5596 0 0 0 0 0 0 [...
1024 ppp0:15475140 20721 410 0 0 410 0 0 [...
1025 eth0: 614530 7085 0 0 0 0 0 1 [...
1026
1027 ...] Transmit
1028 ...] bytes packets errs drop fifo colls carrier compressed
1029 ...] 908188 5596 0 0 0 0 0 0
1030 ...] 1375103 17405 0 0 0 0 0 0
1031 ...] 1703981 5535 0 0 0 3 0 0
1032
1033In addition, each Channel Bond interface has its own directory. For
1034example, the bond0 device will have a directory called /proc/net/bond0/.
1035It will contain information that is specific to that bond, such as the
1036current slaves of the bond, the link status of the slaves, and how
1037many times the slaves link has failed.
1038
10391.5 SCSI info
1040-------------
1041
1042If you have a SCSI host adapter in your system, you'll find a subdirectory
1043named after the driver for this adapter in /proc/scsi. You'll also see a list
1044of all recognized SCSI devices in /proc/scsi:
1045
1046 >cat /proc/scsi/scsi
1047 Attached devices:
1048 Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
1049 Vendor: IBM Model: DGHS09U Rev: 03E0
1050 Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 03
1051 Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 06 Lun: 00
1052 Vendor: PIONEER Model: CD-ROM DR-U06S Rev: 1.04
1053 Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 02
1054
1055
1056The directory named after the driver has one file for each adapter found in
1057the system. These files contain information about the controller, including
1058the used IRQ and the IO address range. The amount of information shown is
1059dependent on the adapter you use. The example shows the output for an Adaptec
1060AHA-2940 SCSI adapter:
1061
1062 > cat /proc/scsi/aic7xxx/0
1063
1064 Adaptec AIC7xxx driver version: 5.1.19/3.2.4
1065 Compile Options:
1066 TCQ Enabled By Default : Disabled
1067 AIC7XXX_PROC_STATS : Disabled
1068 AIC7XXX_RESET_DELAY : 5
1069 Adapter Configuration:
1070 SCSI Adapter: Adaptec AHA-294X Ultra SCSI host adapter
1071 Ultra Wide Controller
1072 PCI MMAPed I/O Base: 0xeb001000
1073 Adapter SEEPROM Config: SEEPROM found and used.
1074 Adaptec SCSI BIOS: Enabled
1075 IRQ: 10
1076 SCBs: Active 0, Max Active 2,
1077 Allocated 15, HW 16, Page 255
1078 Interrupts: 160328
1079 BIOS Control Word: 0x18b6
1080 Adapter Control Word: 0x005b
1081 Extended Translation: Enabled
1082 Disconnect Enable Flags: 0xffff
1083 Ultra Enable Flags: 0x0001
1084 Tag Queue Enable Flags: 0x0000
1085 Ordered Queue Tag Flags: 0x0000
1086 Default Tag Queue Depth: 8
1087 Tagged Queue By Device array for aic7xxx host instance 0:
1088 {255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255}
1089 Actual queue depth per device for aic7xxx host instance 0:
1090 {1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1}
1091 Statistics:
1092 (scsi0:0:0:0)
1093 Device using Wide/Sync transfers at 40.0 MByte/sec, offset 8
1094 Transinfo settings: current(12/8/1/0), goal(12/8/1/0), user(12/15/1/0)
1095 Total transfers 160151 (74577 reads and 85574 writes)
1096 (scsi0:0:6:0)
1097 Device using Narrow/Sync transfers at 5.0 MByte/sec, offset 15
1098 Transinfo settings: current(50/15/0/0), goal(50/15/0/0), user(50/15/0/0)
1099 Total transfers 0 (0 reads and 0 writes)
1100
1101
11021.6 Parallel port info in /proc/parport
1103---------------------------------------
1104
1105The directory /proc/parport contains information about the parallel ports of
1106your system. It has one subdirectory for each port, named after the port
1107number (0,1,2,...).
1108
1109These directories contain the four files shown in Table 1-10.
1110
1111
1112Table 1-10: Files in /proc/parport
1113..............................................................................
1114 File Content
1115 autoprobe Any IEEE-1284 device ID information that has been acquired.
1116 devices list of the device drivers using that port. A + will appear by the
1117 name of the device currently using the port (it might not appear
1118 against any).
1119 hardware Parallel port's base address, IRQ line and DMA channel.
1120 irq IRQ that parport is using for that port. This is in a separate
1121 file to allow you to alter it by writing a new value in (IRQ
1122 number or none).
1123..............................................................................
1124
11251.7 TTY info in /proc/tty
1126-------------------------
1127
1128Information about the available and actually used tty's can be found in the
1129directory /proc/tty.You'll find entries for drivers and line disciplines in
1130this directory, as shown in Table 1-11.
1131
1132
1133Table 1-11: Files in /proc/tty
1134..............................................................................
1135 File Content
1136 drivers list of drivers and their usage
1137 ldiscs registered line disciplines
1138 driver/serial usage statistic and status of single tty lines
1139..............................................................................
1140
1141To see which tty's are currently in use, you can simply look into the file
1142/proc/tty/drivers:
1143
1144 > cat /proc/tty/drivers
1145 pty_slave /dev/pts 136 0-255 pty:slave
1146 pty_master /dev/ptm 128 0-255 pty:master
1147 pty_slave /dev/ttyp 3 0-255 pty:slave
1148 pty_master /dev/pty 2 0-255 pty:master
1149 serial /dev/cua 5 64-67 serial:callout
1150 serial /dev/ttyS 4 64-67 serial
1151 /dev/tty0 /dev/tty0 4 0 system:vtmaster
1152 /dev/ptmx /dev/ptmx 5 2 system
1153 /dev/console /dev/console 5 1 system:console
1154 /dev/tty /dev/tty 5 0 system:/dev/tty
1155 unknown /dev/tty 4 1-63 console
1156
1157
11581.8 Miscellaneous kernel statistics in /proc/stat
1159-------------------------------------------------
1160
1161Various pieces of information about kernel activity are available in the
1162/proc/stat file. All of the numbers reported in this file are aggregates
1163since the system first booted. For a quick look, simply cat the file:
1164
1165 > cat /proc/stat
1166 cpu 2255 34 2290 22625563 6290 127 456 0 0
1167 cpu0 1132 34 1441 11311718 3675 127 438 0 0
1168 cpu1 1123 0 849 11313845 2614 0 18 0 0
1169 intr 114930548 113199788 3 0 5 263 0 4 [... lots more numbers ...]
1170 ctxt 1990473
1171 btime 1062191376
1172 processes 2915
1173 procs_running 1
1174 procs_blocked 0
1175 softirq 183433 0 21755 12 39 1137 231 21459 2263
1176
1177The very first "cpu" line aggregates the numbers in all of the other "cpuN"
1178lines. These numbers identify the amount of time the CPU has spent performing
1179different kinds of work. Time units are in USER_HZ (typically hundredths of a
1180second). The meanings of the columns are as follows, from left to right:
1181
1182- user: normal processes executing in user mode
1183- nice: niced processes executing in user mode
1184- system: processes executing in kernel mode
1185- idle: twiddling thumbs
1186- iowait: waiting for I/O to complete
1187- irq: servicing interrupts
1188- softirq: servicing softirqs
1189- steal: involuntary wait
1190- guest: running a normal guest
1191- guest_nice: running a niced guest
1192
1193The "intr" line gives counts of interrupts serviced since boot time, for each
1194of the possible system interrupts. The first column is the total of all
1195interrupts serviced; each subsequent column is the total for that particular
1196interrupt.
1197
1198The "ctxt" line gives the total number of context switches across all CPUs.
1199
1200The "btime" line gives the time at which the system booted, in seconds since
1201the Unix epoch.
1202
1203The "processes" line gives the number of processes and threads created, which
1204includes (but is not limited to) those created by calls to the fork() and
1205clone() system calls.
1206
1207The "procs_running" line gives the total number of threads that are
1208running or ready to run (i.e., the total number of runnable threads).
1209
1210The "procs_blocked" line gives the number of processes currently blocked,
1211waiting for I/O to complete.
1212
1213The "softirq" line gives counts of softirqs serviced since boot time, for each
1214of the possible system softirqs. The first column is the total of all
1215softirqs serviced; each subsequent column is the total for that particular
1216softirq.
1217
1218
12191.9 Ext4 file system parameters
1220------------------------------
1221
1222Information about mounted ext4 file systems can be found in
1223/proc/fs/ext4. Each mounted filesystem will have a directory in
1224/proc/fs/ext4 based on its device name (i.e., /proc/fs/ext4/hdc or
1225/proc/fs/ext4/dm-0). The files in each per-device directory are shown
1226in Table 1-12, below.
1227
1228Table 1-12: Files in /proc/fs/ext4/<devname>
1229..............................................................................
1230 File Content
1231 mb_groups details of multiblock allocator buddy cache of free blocks
1232..............................................................................
1233
12342.0 /proc/consoles
1235------------------
1236Shows registered system console lines.
1237
1238To see which character device lines are currently used for the system console
1239/dev/console, you may simply look into the file /proc/consoles:
1240
1241 > cat /proc/consoles
1242 tty0 -WU (ECp) 4:7
1243 ttyS0 -W- (Ep) 4:64
1244
1245The columns are:
1246
1247 device name of the device
1248 operations R = can do read operations
1249 W = can do write operations
1250 U = can do unblank
1251 flags E = it is enabled
1252 C = it is preferred console
1253 B = it is primary boot console
1254 p = it is used for printk buffer
1255 b = it is not a TTY but a Braille device
1256 a = it is safe to use when cpu is offline
1257 major:minor major and minor number of the device separated by a colon
1258
1259------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1260Summary
1261------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1262The /proc file system serves information about the running system. It not only
1263allows access to process data but also allows you to request the kernel status
1264by reading files in the hierarchy.
1265
1266The directory structure of /proc reflects the types of information and makes
1267it easy, if not obvious, where to look for specific data.
1268------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1269
1270------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1271CHAPTER 2: MODIFYING SYSTEM PARAMETERS
1272------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1273
1274------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1275In This Chapter
1276------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1277* Modifying kernel parameters by writing into files found in /proc/sys
1278* Exploring the files which modify certain parameters
1279* Review of the /proc/sys file tree
1280------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1281
1282
1283A very interesting part of /proc is the directory /proc/sys. This is not only
1284a source of information, it also allows you to change parameters within the
1285kernel. Be very careful when attempting this. You can optimize your system,
1286but you can also cause it to crash. Never alter kernel parameters on a
1287production system. Set up a development machine and test to make sure that
1288everything works the way you want it to. You may have no alternative but to
1289reboot the machine once an error has been made.
1290
1291To change a value, simply echo the new value into the file. An example is
1292given below in the section on the file system data. You need to be root to do
1293this. You can create your own boot script to perform this every time your
1294system boots.
1295
1296The files in /proc/sys can be used to fine tune and monitor miscellaneous and
1297general things in the operation of the Linux kernel. Since some of the files
1298can inadvertently disrupt your system, it is advisable to read both
1299documentation and source before actually making adjustments. In any case, be
1300very careful when writing to any of these files. The entries in /proc may
1301change slightly between the 2.1.* and the 2.2 kernel, so if there is any doubt
1302review the kernel documentation in the directory /usr/src/linux/Documentation.
1303This chapter is heavily based on the documentation included in the pre 2.2
1304kernels, and became part of it in version 2.2.1 of the Linux kernel.
1305
1306Please see: Documentation/sysctl/ directory for descriptions of these
1307entries.
1308
1309------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1310Summary
1311------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1312Certain aspects of kernel behavior can be modified at runtime, without the
1313need to recompile the kernel, or even to reboot the system. The files in the
1314/proc/sys tree can not only be read, but also modified. You can use the echo
1315command to write value into these files, thereby changing the default settings
1316of the kernel.
1317------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1318
1319------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1320CHAPTER 3: PER-PROCESS PARAMETERS
1321------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1322
13233.1 /proc/<pid>/oom_adj & /proc/<pid>/oom_score_adj- Adjust the oom-killer score
1324--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1325
1326These file can be used to adjust the badness heuristic used to select which
1327process gets killed in out of memory conditions.
1328
1329The badness heuristic assigns a value to each candidate task ranging from 0
1330(never kill) to 1000 (always kill) to determine which process is targeted. The
1331units are roughly a proportion along that range of allowed memory the process
1332may allocate from based on an estimation of its current memory and swap use.
1333For example, if a task is using all allowed memory, its badness score will be
13341000. If it is using half of its allowed memory, its score will be 500.
1335
1336There is an additional factor included in the badness score: root
1337processes are given 3% extra memory over other tasks.
1338
1339The amount of "allowed" memory depends on the context in which the oom killer
1340was called. If it is due to the memory assigned to the allocating task's cpuset
1341being exhausted, the allowed memory represents the set of mems assigned to that
1342cpuset. If it is due to a mempolicy's node(s) being exhausted, the allowed
1343memory represents the set of mempolicy nodes. If it is due to a memory
1344limit (or swap limit) being reached, the allowed memory is that configured
1345limit. Finally, if it is due to the entire system being out of memory, the
1346allowed memory represents all allocatable resources.
1347
1348The value of /proc/<pid>/oom_score_adj is added to the badness score before it
1349is used to determine which task to kill. Acceptable values range from -1000
1350(OOM_SCORE_ADJ_MIN) to +1000 (OOM_SCORE_ADJ_MAX). This allows userspace to
1351polarize the preference for oom killing either by always preferring a certain
1352task or completely disabling it. The lowest possible value, -1000, is
1353equivalent to disabling oom killing entirely for that task since it will always
1354report a badness score of 0.
1355
1356Consequently, it is very simple for userspace to define the amount of memory to
1357consider for each task. Setting a /proc/<pid>/oom_score_adj value of +500, for
1358example, is roughly equivalent to allowing the remainder of tasks sharing the
1359same system, cpuset, mempolicy, or memory controller resources to use at least
136050% more memory. A value of -500, on the other hand, would be roughly
1361equivalent to discounting 50% of the task's allowed memory from being considered
1362as scoring against the task.
1363
1364For backwards compatibility with previous kernels, /proc/<pid>/oom_adj may also
1365be used to tune the badness score. Its acceptable values range from -16
1366(OOM_ADJUST_MIN) to +15 (OOM_ADJUST_MAX) and a special value of -17
1367(OOM_DISABLE) to disable oom killing entirely for that task. Its value is
1368scaled linearly with /proc/<pid>/oom_score_adj.
1369
1370Writing to /proc/<pid>/oom_score_adj or /proc/<pid>/oom_adj will change the
1371other with its scaled value.
1372
1373The value of /proc/<pid>/oom_score_adj may be reduced no lower than the last
1374value set by a CAP_SYS_RESOURCE process. To reduce the value any lower
1375requires CAP_SYS_RESOURCE.
1376
1377NOTICE: /proc/<pid>/oom_adj is deprecated and will be removed, please see
1378Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt.
1379
1380Caveat: when a parent task is selected, the oom killer will sacrifice any first
1381generation children with separate address spaces instead, if possible. This
1382avoids servers and important system daemons from being killed and loses the
1383minimal amount of work.
1384
1385
13863.2 /proc/<pid>/oom_score - Display current oom-killer score
1387-------------------------------------------------------------
1388
1389This file can be used to check the current score used by the oom-killer is for
1390any given <pid>. Use it together with /proc/<pid>/oom_adj to tune which
1391process should be killed in an out-of-memory situation.
1392
1393
13943.3 /proc/<pid>/io - Display the IO accounting fields
1395-------------------------------------------------------
1396
1397This file contains IO statistics for each running process
1398
1399Example
1400-------
1401
1402test:/tmp # dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test.dat &
1403[1] 3828
1404
1405test:/tmp # cat /proc/3828/io
1406rchar: 323934931
1407wchar: 323929600
1408syscr: 632687
1409syscw: 632675
1410read_bytes: 0
1411write_bytes: 323932160
1412cancelled_write_bytes: 0
1413
1414
1415Description
1416-----------
1417
1418rchar
1419-----
1420
1421I/O counter: chars read
1422The number of bytes which this task has caused to be read from storage. This
1423is simply the sum of bytes which this process passed to read() and pread().
1424It includes things like tty IO and it is unaffected by whether or not actual
1425physical disk IO was required (the read might have been satisfied from
1426pagecache)
1427
1428
1429wchar
1430-----
1431
1432I/O counter: chars written
1433The number of bytes which this task has caused, or shall cause to be written
1434to disk. Similar caveats apply here as with rchar.
1435
1436
1437syscr
1438-----
1439
1440I/O counter: read syscalls
1441Attempt to count the number of read I/O operations, i.e. syscalls like read()
1442and pread().
1443
1444
1445syscw
1446-----
1447
1448I/O counter: write syscalls
1449Attempt to count the number of write I/O operations, i.e. syscalls like
1450write() and pwrite().
1451
1452
1453read_bytes
1454----------
1455
1456I/O counter: bytes read
1457Attempt to count the number of bytes which this process really did cause to
1458be fetched from the storage layer. Done at the submit_bio() level, so it is
1459accurate for block-backed filesystems. <please add status regarding NFS and
1460CIFS at a later time>
1461
1462
1463write_bytes
1464-----------
1465
1466I/O counter: bytes written
1467Attempt to count the number of bytes which this process caused to be sent to
1468the storage layer. This is done at page-dirtying time.
1469
1470
1471cancelled_write_bytes
1472---------------------
1473
1474The big inaccuracy here is truncate. If a process writes 1MB to a file and
1475then deletes the file, it will in fact perform no writeout. But it will have
1476been accounted as having caused 1MB of write.
1477In other words: The number of bytes which this process caused to not happen,
1478by truncating pagecache. A task can cause "negative" IO too. If this task
1479truncates some dirty pagecache, some IO which another task has been accounted
1480for (in its write_bytes) will not be happening. We _could_ just subtract that
1481from the truncating task's write_bytes, but there is information loss in doing
1482that.
1483
1484
1485Note
1486----
1487
1488At its current implementation state, this is a bit racy on 32-bit machines: if
1489process A reads process B's /proc/pid/io while process B is updating one of
1490those 64-bit counters, process A could see an intermediate result.
1491
1492
1493More information about this can be found within the taskstats documentation in
1494Documentation/accounting.
1495
14963.4 /proc/<pid>/coredump_filter - Core dump filtering settings
1497---------------------------------------------------------------
1498When a process is dumped, all anonymous memory is written to a core file as
1499long as the size of the core file isn't limited. But sometimes we don't want
1500to dump some memory segments, for example, huge shared memory. Conversely,
1501sometimes we want to save file-backed memory segments into a core file, not
1502only the individual files.
1503
1504/proc/<pid>/coredump_filter allows you to customize which memory segments
1505will be dumped when the <pid> process is dumped. coredump_filter is a bitmask
1506of memory types. If a bit of the bitmask is set, memory segments of the
1507corresponding memory type are dumped, otherwise they are not dumped.
1508
1509The following 7 memory types are supported:
1510 - (bit 0) anonymous private memory
1511 - (bit 1) anonymous shared memory
1512 - (bit 2) file-backed private memory
1513 - (bit 3) file-backed shared memory
1514 - (bit 4) ELF header pages in file-backed private memory areas (it is
1515 effective only if the bit 2 is cleared)
1516 - (bit 5) hugetlb private memory
1517 - (bit 6) hugetlb shared memory
1518
1519 Note that MMIO pages such as frame buffer are never dumped and vDSO pages
1520 are always dumped regardless of the bitmask status.
1521
1522 Note bit 0-4 doesn't effect any hugetlb memory. hugetlb memory are only
1523 effected by bit 5-6.
1524
1525Default value of coredump_filter is 0x23; this means all anonymous memory
1526segments and hugetlb private memory are dumped.
1527
1528If you don't want to dump all shared memory segments attached to pid 1234,
1529write 0x21 to the process's proc file.
1530
1531 $ echo 0x21 > /proc/1234/coredump_filter
1532
1533When a new process is created, the process inherits the bitmask status from its
1534parent. It is useful to set up coredump_filter before the program runs.
1535For example:
1536
1537 $ echo 0x7 > /proc/self/coredump_filter
1538 $ ./some_program
1539
15403.5 /proc/<pid>/mountinfo - Information about mounts
1541--------------------------------------------------------
1542
1543This file contains lines of the form:
1544
154536 35 98:0 /mnt1 /mnt2 rw,noatime master:1 - ext3 /dev/root rw,errors=continue
1546(1)(2)(3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11)
1547
1548(1) mount ID: unique identifier of the mount (may be reused after umount)
1549(2) parent ID: ID of parent (or of self for the top of the mount tree)
1550(3) major:minor: value of st_dev for files on filesystem
1551(4) root: root of the mount within the filesystem
1552(5) mount point: mount point relative to the process's root
1553(6) mount options: per mount options
1554(7) optional fields: zero or more fields of the form "tag[:value]"
1555(8) separator: marks the end of the optional fields
1556(9) filesystem type: name of filesystem of the form "type[.subtype]"
1557(10) mount source: filesystem specific information or "none"
1558(11) super options: per super block options
1559
1560Parsers should ignore all unrecognised optional fields. Currently the
1561possible optional fields are:
1562
1563shared:X mount is shared in peer group X
1564master:X mount is slave to peer group X
1565propagate_from:X mount is slave and receives propagation from peer group X (*)
1566unbindable mount is unbindable
1567
1568(*) X is the closest dominant peer group under the process's root. If
1569X is the immediate master of the mount, or if there's no dominant peer
1570group under the same root, then only the "master:X" field is present
1571and not the "propagate_from:X" field.
1572
1573For more information on mount propagation see:
1574
1575 Documentation/filesystems/sharedsubtree.txt
1576
1577
15783.6 /proc/<pid>/comm & /proc/<pid>/task/<tid>/comm
1579--------------------------------------------------------
1580These files provide a method to access a tasks comm value. It also allows for
1581a task to set its own or one of its thread siblings comm value. The comm value
1582is limited in size compared to the cmdline value, so writing anything longer
1583then the kernel's TASK_COMM_LEN (currently 16 chars) will result in a truncated
1584comm value.
1585
1586
15873.7 /proc/<pid>/task/<tid>/children - Information about task children
1588-------------------------------------------------------------------------
1589This file provides a fast way to retrieve first level children pids
1590of a task pointed by <pid>/<tid> pair. The format is a space separated
1591stream of pids.
1592
1593Note the "first level" here -- if a child has own children they will
1594not be listed here, one needs to read /proc/<children-pid>/task/<tid>/children
1595to obtain the descendants.
1596
1597Since this interface is intended to be fast and cheap it doesn't
1598guarantee to provide precise results and some children might be
1599skipped, especially if they've exited right after we printed their
1600pids, so one need to either stop or freeze processes being inspected
1601if precise results are needed.
1602
1603
1604------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1605Configuring procfs
1606------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1607
16084.1 Mount options
1609---------------------
1610
1611The following mount options are supported:
1612
1613 hidepid= Set /proc/<pid>/ access mode.
1614 gid= Set the group authorized to learn processes information.
1615
1616hidepid=0 means classic mode - everybody may access all /proc/<pid>/ directories
1617(default).
1618
1619hidepid=1 means users may not access any /proc/<pid>/ directories but their
1620own. Sensitive files like cmdline, sched*, status are now protected against
1621other users. This makes it impossible to learn whether any user runs
1622specific program (given the program doesn't reveal itself by its behaviour).
1623As an additional bonus, as /proc/<pid>/cmdline is unaccessible for other users,
1624poorly written programs passing sensitive information via program arguments are
1625now protected against local eavesdroppers.
1626
1627hidepid=2 means hidepid=1 plus all /proc/<pid>/ will be fully invisible to other
1628users. It doesn't mean that it hides a fact whether a process with a specific
1629pid value exists (it can be learned by other means, e.g. by "kill -0 $PID"),
1630but it hides process' uid and gid, which may be learned by stat()'ing
1631/proc/<pid>/ otherwise. It greatly complicates an intruder's task of gathering
1632information about running processes, whether some daemon runs with elevated
1633privileges, whether other user runs some sensitive program, whether other users
1634run any program at all, etc.
1635
1636gid= defines a group authorized to learn processes information otherwise
1637prohibited by hidepid=. If you use some daemon like identd which needs to learn
1638information about processes information, just add identd to this group.