From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Sep 16 23:29:11 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 99A7B16A4CF for ; Thu, 16 Sep 2004 23:29:11 +0000 (GMT) Received: from out008.verizon.net (out008pub.verizon.net [206.46.170.108]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C4BBE43D1F for ; Thu, 16 Sep 2004 23:29:10 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from [192.168.1.3] ([68.160.246.51]) by out008.verizon.net (InterMail vM.5.01.06.06 201-253-122-130-106-20030910) with ESMTP id <20040916232910.GTEN8960.out008.verizon.net@[192.168.1.3]>; Thu, 16 Sep 2004 18:29:10 -0500 Message-ID: <414A21C0.90804@mac.com> Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 19:29:04 -0400 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Lewis Thompson References: <20040916225107.GA54786@fajita.org> In-Reply-To: <20040916225107.GA54786@fajita.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Authentication-Info: Submitted using SMTP AUTH at out008.verizon.net from [68.160.246.51] at Thu, 16 Sep 2004 18:29:09 -0500 cc: FreeBSD-questions Subject: Re: sysctl meanings. X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 23:29:11 -0000 Lewis Thompson wrote: > I wonder if there is a comprehensive list of what many of the sysctl > values are, both in terms of what the node (by this I mean, say, > hw.acpi.verbose) means, and what the values would mean/do? 'sysctl -d -a hw' will give a one-line description for many of the sysctls, and it's not uncommon for manpages to provide more details-- more often for manpages in section 4 and 8, ie, things like device drivers. 'sysctl -a' is not comprehensive since it doesn't include references to kernel options (or modules) which have not been enabled, but it's close. To do better then that, look at the sources under /usr/src/sys. > If this doesn't exist would it be worth creating a website with a list > of all these? I've got some spare time in the next couple of days and I > could whip something up in PHP that would hopefully do the job. If doing this would please you, by all means: it would be somewhat useful. :-) However, you might find that submitting src patches to add descriptions to the rest of the sysctls and/or clarify existing descriptions if they are too short or not informative would be more useful. Also, you might give a thought to writing this stuff up in DocBook and submitting it to become part of the FreeBSD documentation, rather than rolling your own site. I suspect that people are more likely to help keep "real" docs up-to-date, but YMMV.... -- -Chuck