NAME

     filemon — the filemon device

SYNOPSIS

     #include <dev/filemon/filemon.h>

DESCRIPTION

     The filemon device allows a process to collect file operations data of its children.  The
     device /dev/filemon responds to two ioctl(2) calls.

     filemon is not intended to be a security auditing tool.  Many system calls are not tracked
     and binaries of foreign ABI will not be fully audited.  It is intended for auditing of
     processes for the purpose of determining its dependencies in an efficient and easily
     parsable format.  An example of this is make(1) which uses this module with .MAKE.MODE=meta
     to handle incremental builds more smartly.

     System calls are denoted using the following single letters:

     ‘A’     openat(2).  The next log entry may be lacking an absolute path or be inaccurate.
     ‘C’     chdir(2)
     ‘D’     unlink(2)
     ‘E’     exec(2)
     ‘F’     fork(2), vfork(2)
     ‘L’     link(2), linkat(2), symlink(2), symlinkat(2)
     ‘M’     rename(2)
     ‘R’     open(2) or openat(2) for read
     ‘W’     open(2) or openat(2) for write
     ‘X’     _exit(2)

     Note that ‘R’ following ‘W’ records can represent a single open(2) for R/W, or two separate
     open(2) calls, one for ‘R’ and one for ‘W’.  Note that only successful system calls are
     captured.

IOCTLS

     User mode programs communicate with the filemon driver through a number of ioctls which are
     described below.  Each takes a single argument.

     FILEMON_SET_FD   Write the internal tracing buffer to the supplied open file descriptor.

     FILEMON_SET_PID  Child process ID to trace.  This should normally be done under the control
                      of a parent in the child after fork(2) but before anything else.  See the
                      example below.

RETURN VALUES

     The ioctl() function returns the value 0 if successful; otherwise the value -1 is returned
     and the global variable errno is set to indicate the error.

ERRORS

     The ioctl() system call with FILEMON_SET_FD will fail if:

     [EEXIST]           The filemon handle is already associated with a file descriptor.

     The ioctl() system call with FILEMON_SET_PID will fail if:

     [ESRCH]            No process having the specified process ID exists.

     [EBUSY]            The process ID specified is already being traced and was not the current
                        process.

     The close() system call on the filemon file descriptor may fail with the errors from
     write(2) if any error is encountered while writing the log.  It may also fail if:

     [EFAULT]           An invalid address was used for a traced system call argument, resulting
                        in no log entry for the system call.

     [ENAMETOOLONG]     An argument for a traced system call was too long, resulting in no log
                        entry for the system call.

FILES

     /dev/filemon

EXAMPLES

     #include <sys/types.h>
     #include <sys/stat.h>
     #include <sys/wait.h>
     #include <sys/ioctl.h>
     #include <dev/filemon/filemon.h>
     #include <fcntl.h>
     #include <err.h>
     #include <unistd.h>

     static void
     open_filemon(void)
     {
             pid_t child;
             int fm_fd, fm_log;

             if ((fm_fd = open("/dev/filemon", O_RDWR | O_CLOEXEC)) == -1)
                     err(1, "open(\"/dev/filemon\", O_RDWR)");
             if ((fm_log = open("filemon.out",
                 O_CREAT | O_WRONLY | O_TRUNC | O_CLOEXEC, DEFFILEMODE)) == -1)
                     err(1, "open(filemon.out)");

             if (ioctl(fm_fd, FILEMON_SET_FD, &fm_log) == -1)
                     err(1, "Cannot set filemon log file descriptor");

             if ((child = fork()) == 0) {
                     child = getpid();
                     if (ioctl(fm_fd, FILEMON_SET_PID, &child) == -1)
                             err(1, "Cannot set filemon PID");
                     /* Do something here. */
             } else {
                     wait(&child);
                     close(fm_fd);
             }
     }

     Creates a file named filemon.out and configures the filemon device to write the filemon
     buffer contents to it.

SEE ALSO

     dtrace(1), ktrace(1), script(1), truss(1), ioctl(2)

HISTORY

     A filemon device appeared in FreeBSD 9.1.

BUGS

     Unloading the module may panic the system, thus requires using kldunload -f.