Statsfs: A Proposed Linux File-System For Kernel Statistics

Statsfs is a new RAM-based file-system proposal by a Red Hat engineer that is designed for exposing kernel statistics to user-space.

Currently when kernel subsystems want to expose different statistics to user-space, it's done via DebugFS (or sysfs). In the case of DebugFS, users generally need root privileges to access the data and users are often left to implement their own tools for each different subsystem exposing the statistics differently.

Red Hat's Emanuele Giuseppe Esposito has hacked together Statsfs in order to reduce kernel duplication of different subsystems working on their statistics reporting, avoid dirtying DebugFS with different statistics code, and making it easier for user-space to aggregate and display different kernel statistics.

Statsfs is a synthetic RAM-based virtual file-system with plans to be mounted under /sys/kernel/stats while offering a generic and stable API.

More details on the Statsfs proposal via this kernel thread.