Procfs

1. Introduction

This program is called procfs, the /proc translator. This program provides a GNU/Linux compatible /proc pseudo file- system on GNU Hurd. This is called a translator since it translates the process related information stored in the MACH Microkernel which is made available through the proc server and the libps library into a virtual filesystem.

2. Goal

The major goal of writing this translator was to make the process related tools like pgrep, pkill, kill which are packaged in procps, killall, pstree which are packaged in psmisc and various other process related tools that rely on GNU/Linux's /proc filesystem to run out of the box on Hurd.

3. Install

To install this translator you can simply do the following. Just cd to the directory named src in the root of the tree of the translator source code. Just type

$ make

This builds the translator. After building the translator, you get a binary named procfs. You need to set it as a translator. To do so you can type the following command from the src dir- ectory where you built the translator

$ settrans -fgap /proc procfs

Viola! You are done setting up the translator. Now in case you want to use the debian hurd binaries to work with tools like pgrep, pkill, kill, htop etc, you can just download the binaries which I have uploaded here:

http://madhusudancs.info/procfs-testing-how-to-mini

The patches to the source packages will be made available soon.