During Linux development a large variety of administrative tools has evolved. Many of these are distribution specific ( linuxconf, yast, etc.) and are of no interest for embedded systems as they are tailored to the demands of the distribution and not really adaptable to the needs of a dedicated device. They are too heavy-weighted for most embedded platforms. A large set of distribution independent administrative tools is also available, many of which integrate into the POSIX2 specs ( ifconfig, route, etc.). But some of these tools, notably those that relied on the proc file system are too heavy weight for embedded systems due to the large number of system calls required to access information in /proc. Some typical examples of this overhead are listed below:
| Command | Options | Nr of syscalls |
| sysctl | -a | 2750 |
| top | -n1 | 1350 |
| who | -u | 174 |
| route | 135 | |
| ifconfig | 88 |
Number of system calls on a normal desktop for some typical admin tools. Results naturally will vary on different systems.
Looking at the tools in detail the overhead is produced due to a few factors:
The first three issues listed might not seem like disadvantages if they did not have a dramatic influence on the resource demands - but this is not quite correct. The issues of configurability and abundance of runtime options is critical, and any product-hot-line will be able to tell this, because the maintenance personnel often will not be trained to a level to manage all of these options leading to misinterpretation and consequent errors. The goal of an administrative interface is to provide all necessary data to the administrative personnel in a well-documented manner and with a minimum complexity. Taking the above list - the admin interface demands can be sketched out as
What does this all have to do with the proc interface? Administrative interfaces primarily are monitoring system operations, user space tasks are looked at from the kernels perspective, i.e. administration interfaces are primarily interested in kernel-space data-structures and thus it is very expensive to put these administrative interfaces in user space.