> My point is about the elegance of using open/read/write/close I certainly agree with you that they are more pleasant to use, and I think procfs could one day

> My point is about the elegance of using open/read/write/close I certainly agree with you that they are more pleasant to use, and I think procfs could one day solve the atomic snapshot issue. For example, there could be a /proc/snapshot directory. Running mkdir inside there could take a snapshot that the calling process would then be free to traverse at its leisure. It could be tied to the process group that called mkdir to make sure the snapshot gets automatically cleaned up when the calling process terminates. I think this would work a lot better with Plan 9's per-process namespaces but it could be hacked onto Linux. At that point, the only argument I would have against procfs would be that we'd be paying for hundreds to thousands of syscalls compared to sysctl costing us only one syscall (or rather, two syscalls if I'm reading the FreeBSD source for kinfo_getallproc correctly).