The Linux procfs is nothing like Plan 9's /proc or Inferno's /prog, in fact it's nothing like any other operating system's procfs. All procfs are different, onl

The Linux procfs is nothing like Plan 9's /proc or Inferno's /prog, in fact it's nothing like any other operating system's procfs. All procfs are different, only the name, and perhaps the mountpoints are similar. I'm not even talking about implementation details, I'm talking about the abstraction itself; what does it do and what it allows you to do. The clone(2) system call is somewhat superficially similar to Plan 9's rfork(2). Linux came to the same conclusion as Plan 9; threads vs. processes is a false dichotomy. The fundamental schedulable kernel entity is a thread and threads may or may not not share resources, like address space. The similarities end quickly, however. Linux clone(2) is crippled by the fact that flags that allow novel abstractions, like universal network transparency, such as the flags that set up per process namespace are restricted to the superuser. This is of course a consequence of the Unix security model and because Linux has suid binaries.