procfs

This procfs package provides functions to retrieve system, kernel and process metrics from the pseudo-filesystems /proc and /sys.

WARNING: This package is a work in progress. Its API may still break in backwards-incompatible ways without warnings. Use it at your own risk.

Usage

The procfs library is organized by packages based on whether the gathered data is coming from /proc, /sys, or both. Each package contains an FS type which represents the path to either /proc, /sys, or both. For example, current cpu statistics are gathered from /proc/stat and are available via the root procfs package. First, the proc filesystem mount point is initialized, and then the stat information is read.

fs, err := procfs.NewFS("/proc")
stats, err := fs.Stat()

Some sub-packages such as blockdevice, require access to both the proc and sys filesystems.

    fs, err := blockdevice.NewFS("/proc", "/sys")
    stats, err := fs.ProcDiskstats()

Building and Testing

The procfs library is normally built as part of another application. However, when making changes to the library, the make test command can be used to run the API test suite.

Updating Test Fixtures

The procfs library includes a set of test fixtures which include many example files from the /proc and /sys filesystems. These fixtures are included as a ttar file which is extracted automatically during testing. To add/update the test fixtures, first ensure the fixtures directory is up to date by removing the existing directory and then extracting the ttar file using make fixtures/.unpacked or just make test.

rm -rf fixtures
make test

Next, make the required changes to the extracted files in the fixtures directory. When the changes are complete, run make update_fixtures to create a new fixtures.ttar file based on the updated fixtures directory. And finally, verify the changes using git diff fixtures.ttar.