From owner-freebsd-current Tue Nov 23 23:25:30 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from apollo.backplane.com (apollo.backplane.com [216.240.41.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2FEFD14C8E; Tue, 23 Nov 1999 23:25:26 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dillon@apollo.backplane.com) Received: (from dillon@localhost) by apollo.backplane.com (8.9.3/8.9.1) id XAA14764; Tue, 23 Nov 1999 23:23:20 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dillon) Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 23:23:20 -0800 (PST) From: Matthew Dillon Message-Id: <199911240723.XAA14764@apollo.backplane.com> To: Peter Wemm Cc: Christopher Masto , Poul-Henning Kamp , freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG, security@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ps on 4.0-current References: <19991124070252.96DAD1C6D@overcee.netplex.com.au> Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG :> > and people who need to hide it can set it to "close" to do so. :> :> Please. Thank you. :> :> Not everyone wears the sysadmin hat with the face shield and gas mask, :> as much as it may currently be in style. If it can work both ways, :> even better. : :Definately! This is NOT AN ACCEPTABLE CHANGE BY DEFAULT! : :Cheers, :-Peter I'm trying to figure out how what started as a fix to a panic turned into such a big mess. And I don't even think the panic has even been fixed --- it's just been made more obscure. There is a big difference between -e, which very few people use and which is an obvious security risk simply because people do not realize it is available, and displaying argv from a user-run ps which everyone is used to doing. When I first suggested removing -e I did so both for security reasons and because it would have been trivial to do. What we have at the moment is something entirely different. I would be for removing -e, but I would be adamantly opposed to restricting the display of command line arguments - not even with an opt-in sysctl. It's just added baggage. And I don't see much point in trying to make ps and top run faster. They are plenty fast enough already (well, maybe not top, but that's for other reasons unrelated to the display of command line arguments). ps *already* delves (or delved) into kvm to retrieve command line arguments only for processes not swapped out, meaning that running ps never causes processes or data to be swapped in unless you specify the 'f' option. In otherwords, nothing ps does blocks. I can't imagine how changing the way arguments are fetched by encumbering procfs with even more junk would generate a sufficient boost in performance to be either noticeable visually or worth doing at all. It would be nice if the procfs panics were fixed, but not at the cost of all of this. -Matt Matthew Dillon To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message