unkown proc directory in root

["Wynfield Henman" <wynfield at gmail dot com>]

I just noticed a new (or I just noticed it) directory in what should
be the root directory or C:\cygwin, which should be the same as I
understand it.  But, why do I get different contents, i.e., an
interesting subdirectory "proc" only shows up on  ls /, but not
ls /cygdrive/c/cygwin as shown below:

$ ls /
bin       cygwin.bat  debug.log  home  libexec  sbin  usr
cygdrive  cygwin.ico  etc        lib   proc     tmp   var


$ ls /cygdrive/c/cygwin
bin       cygwin.bat  debug.log  home  libexec  tmp  var
cygdrive  cygwin.ico  etc        lib   sbin     usr

And looking into the /proc I see

$ ls /proc
1728  1952  2420  3856  cpuinfo  meminfo     registry  stat    version
1864  196   284   3900  loadavg  partitions  self      uptime

and  $ls /proc/registry
$ ls /proc/registry
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT    HKEY_CURRENT_USER  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE     HKEY_USERS
HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG  HKEY_DYN_DATA      HKEY_PERFORMANCE_DATA

which contains, a very long list of data.

Has this /proc always been with cygwin?  And why the huge registry data subdir?

Just trying to make sense out of this, having never seen or recall
reading about this directory before.

Thanks
 Henman

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