Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/890449/

Running a command like lsof,
which lists the open files on the system along with information about the
process that has each file open, takes a lot of system calls, mostly to read a
small amount of information from many /proc files. Providing a
new interface to collect those calls together into a single (or, at least,
fewer) system calls is the target of Miklos Szeredi’s getvalues()
RFC patch that was posted on March 22. While the proposal does
not look like it is going far, at least in its current form, it did spark
some discussion of the need—or lack thereof—for a way to reduce this kind
of overhead, as well as to explore some alternative ways to get there via code that
already exists in the kernel.