Linux relics

A handful of Linux features are relics: they still exist and still work the way they do on Linux — so software depending on them keeps running — but they have been superseded and are not part of how anything is meant to be done on Peios. Peios does not document them in depth. For the mechanics of the underlying Linux feature, the authoritative source is third-party Linux documentation (the relevant man pages and the kernel's own docs). Where Peios has a native replacement for what the relic was used for, this page points to it — that, not the relic, is the path to take.

A feature belongs here only if it is genuinely superseded, has no role in Peios's future, and gives essentially no reason to reach for it. This is a short list by design, not a place to park anything inconvenient to document.

Process accounting (acct) #

acct() is BSD process accounting. Called with a filename it turns on system-wide accounting, appending a fixed binary record for every process as it terminates — resource usage, timing, exit status, and a few behaviour flags; called with no argument it turns accounting off. Enabling or disabling it requires SeTcbPrivilege (the privilege Linux's CAP_SYS_PACCT maps to). For the record format and per-field detail, see the Linux acct(2) and acct(5) documentation.

On Peios you almost certainly want eventd and KMES instead: process lifecycle is already an event stream there, keyed on each process's GUID and carrying its real identity, exit status, and resource usage — structured and queryable, where acct produces an opaque append-only file built around the Linux UID model. See the eventd and KMES material for the native way to account for what processes do.