I recently made several updates to a Linux version of of acctcom (actually another accounting add-on package) which I've been using for several years, and one of the people testing it asked a question which I cannot answer. I'm hoping that someone on this list can give me some info.

I have previously (over a year ago) asked on both this and a couple of kernel lists (several times there) about this issue, but nobody has ever answered. So if you have any info about this, I'd really appreciate it.

As in many (all?) previous Linux kernels, the struct acct (defined in /usr/include/sys/acct.h) has members ac_io and ac_rw which are presumably counts of characters transferred and blocks read/written respectively.

However, in the kernel code, the ac_io is set to 0 and the ac_rw gets set to (ac_io/512) or some such - it is set to 0 as well (and thus these are always reported as 0 in process accounting records. not good if you're trying to measure them...).

Does anybody know why this is done that way? A long time ago (IIRC late 2.2 and an early 2.4 kernel) I looked into "fixing" this in the kernel code but was not successful (I finally produced a bootable kernel, but it was unstable. Then I changed jobs, got swamped at work, and eventually gave up).

As I said above, I have previously asked about this issue without success, and I have essentially given up changing or "fixing" it.

But if anyone knows __WHY__ it is this way (I'm hypothesizing that it's just too much work for too little added value), I'd really appreciate knowing the reason. Curiosity and the cat and all that ...

Thanks - Bill