From the course: Exploring Linux Internals: Advanced Insights and Practical Applications

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The /proc pseudo filesystem

The /proc pseudo filesystem - Linux Tutorial

From the course: Exploring Linux Internals: Advanced Insights and Practical Applications

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The /proc pseudo filesystem

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- All right, an important interface to tweak a kernel is a /proc pseudo filesystem. So it provides an interface to kernel data structures. And being a pseudo file system, /proc doesn't give access to a disk device, but it provides access to the kernel directly. The kernel uses other pseudo file systems as well, like sysfs and debugfs. But for now, let's focus on proc, where you will find three types of information. First, there is /proc/ followed by any number. That is where the kernel keeps information about every running process. And these directories are referred to as the PID directories. Then there is /proc/sys, and here you will find kernel tunables organized by different kernel interfaces. It's very important for tweaking the performance of a Linux system and for enabling and disabling specific functionality. And also, directly in /proc, you will find a bunch of files, and these files contain status information about the running system. In many cases, these are files that are…

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