On Sat, 7 Dec 1996, The Great Mr. Kurtz [David A. Gatwood] wrote:

> On Sat, 7 Dec 1996, xiamin wrote:
> 
> > you have no kernal. kern is a directory, and since i dont know the inner
> > workings of unix i dont know what it does, but on my machine io have a
> 
> It's the kernel's directory.  It's fake, that is.  Basically, it's just
> a mount point for the kernel's memory space, if I understand things right.
> Similarly, proc contains a file that contains the entire memory space, I
> believe, but I don't remember the specifics, and I'm on a MkLinux box
> right now which does things a little differently.  :-)

Not quite.  /kern is a mount point for the kernfs file system, which 
contains lots of useful info about the kernel (like its version string).

/proc is the mount point for the procfs file system which contains a 
subdirectory for each active process on the system.  These subdirectories 
contain useful info about the processes.

Both file systems can be compiled into the kernel using OPTIONS PROCS (or 
OPTIONS KERNFS) in the config file, or they can be added later on via the 
loadable kernel module mechanism.