Re: A common layer for Accounting packages

[Guillaume Thouvenin <guillaume.thouvenin@bull.net>]

On Fri, 2005-02-18 at 17:16 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Jay Lan <jlan@sgi.com> wrote:
> >
> > Since the need of Linux system accounting has gone beyond what BSD
> > accounting provides, i think it is a good idea to create a thin layer
> > of common code for various accounting packages, such as BSD accounting,
> > CSA, ELSA, etc. The hook to do_exit() at exit.c was changed to invoke
> > a routine in the common code which would then invoke those accounting
> > packages that register to the acct_common to handle do_exit situation.
> 
> This all seems to be heading in the wrong direction.  Do we really want to
> have lots of different system accounting packages all hooking into a
> generic we-cant-decide-what-to-do-so-we-added-some-pointless-overhead
> framework?
> 
> Can't we get _one_ accounting system in there, get it right, avoid the
> framework?

  Is it possible to just merge the BSD accounting and the CSA accounting
by adding in the current BSD per-process accounting structure some
missing fields like the mm integral provided by the CSA patch?

ELSA is just a user of the accounting data. We need a hook in the
do_fork() routine to manage group of processes, not to do accounting. 

Guillaume