This one is actually pretty neat. When I say that this filesystem is hidden, I mean that when you do an ls of /proc, the mount directory doesn't show up. But you can certainly cd into it and look at its contents.
There are two main types of entities:
This is what /proc/mount looks like on my system:
# ls /proc/mount ls: No such file or directory (/proc/mount/0,8,1,0,0) ls: No such file or directory (/proc/mount/0,1,1,2,-1) 0,1,1,10,11/ 0,344083,1,0,11/ 0,6,7,10,0/ proc/ 0,1,1,11,0/ 0,360468,1,0,11/ 0,8,1,1,0/ usr/ 0,1,1,3,-1/ 0,393228,4,0,11/ dev/ 0,12292,1,0,6/ 0,4105,1,0,4/ fs/ 0,12292,1,1,8/ 0,6,7,0,11/ pkgs/
Each “numbered” directory name (e.g. 0,344083,1,0,11) consists of five numbers, separated by commas. The numbers are, in order:
The node ID is usually zero, indicating “this node.” The process ID is that of the process. The channel ID is the number of the channel created via ChannelCreate(). Finally, the handle is an index describing which resmgr_attach() this is. The last number is the file type (see <sys/ftype.h> for values and meanings).
Together, these five numbers describe a pathname prefix that has been registered in the pathname space.
The other, “normal” directories are the actual registered paths. If we examine a random one, say /proc/mount/dev, we'll see directories corresponding to each of the registered mount points under /dev. You may be wondering why they are directories, and not the actual devices. That's because you can register the same pathname multiple times. Recall that in the High Availability chapter we said that in order to achieve hot-standby mode, we'd want to register two resource managers at the same mount point — the one “in front” would be the active resource manager, the one registered “behind” would be the standby resource manager. If we did this, we'd have two sets of numbers in the subdirectory corresponding to the named device.
For example, currently we have one resource manager managing the serial ports:
# ls /proc/mount/dev/ser1 0,344080,1,0,0
If we had a hot-standby serial port driver (we don't, but play along) the directory listing might now look something like:
# ls /proc/mount/dev/ser1 0,344080,1,0,0 0,674453,1,0,0
The process ID 344080 is the active serial port driver, and the process ID 674453 is the standby serial port driver. The order of the pathname resolution is given by the order that the entries are returned by the readdir() function call. This means that it's not immediately apparent via the ls above which process is resolved first (because by default, ls sorts alphabetically by name), but by calling ls with the -S (“do not sort” option) the order can be determined.