From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!hplabs!sri-unix!mo@Lbl-Unix Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Title: table() system call Article-I.D.: sri-unix.4997 Posted: Fri Dec 31 01:12:31 1982 Received: Sat Jan 1 04:22:55 1983 From: mo at Lbl-Unix (Mike O'Dell [system]) Date: 30 Dec 1982 16:43:18-PST Mike O'Brien's mention of the Harvard table() call is a good idea, but going through a device driver has a major advantage worth mentioning. If access to the tables is embedded in the filesystem, then you could have a "ps" or "iostat" which could look at another machine, given a distributed filesystem. In places with several machines, this would certainly be useful. In a larger sense, this is a effort to divorce programs from intimate knowledge of the kernel. This is not only good, but should be pushed toward programs not having particular knowledge of which machine they are running upon. -Mike