I get what you are alluding to, and you are right that this would require kernel cooperation. But I still think that consistency needs to be defined, before you

I get what you are alluding to, and you are right that this would require kernel cooperation. But I still think that consistency needs to be defined, before you can make such claim. For instance let's say we're joining a table of processes and open network connections. Now we might have network connections that belong to a processes not listed -is this consistent? What if the implementation filters out the connections that do not belong to a process? I guess my point is that a reasonable definition of consistency could be many things, including a definition that says referenced tables are read only once in the order they are encountered (this should be equivalent to a series of eg. ps and netstat commands stored in variables and then manipulated)