Date: Thu, 09 Apr 2015 11:51:17 -0400 From: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Cc: Chris Torek <torek@torek.net> Subject: Re: sysctl output formatting Message-ID: <4560967.0vtmTZXoz1@ralph.baldwin.cx> In-Reply-To: <201504062229.t36MTMlJ024359@elf.torek.net> References: <201504062229.t36MTMlJ024359@elf.torek.net>
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On Monday, April 06, 2015 03:29:22 PM Chris Torek wrote: > We had a side discussion at $work about a private sysctl emulation > (so our side thing doesn't actually affect sysctl itself at all) > where it was suggested that some simple numeric sysctls are "best > displayed in hex". We had this feature for hex and it was removed. 8.x still has SYSCTL_XINT() and friends. It was removed in https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=217586 The argument in that comment is that you should use sysctl -x. However, I think that doesn't really wash. That is fine if you are looking at a single node, but I think SYSCTL_XINT() was useful to set the default format that was used for sysctl -a, etc. You could then have flags to sysctl to override it for individual nodes for use in scripts, etc. > Consider, e.g.: > > $ sysctl kern.timecounter.tc.i8254 > kern.timecounter.tc.i8254.mask: 65535 > kern.timecounter.tc.i8254.counter: 25822 > kern.timecounter.tc.i8254.frequency: 1193182 > kern.timecounter.tc.i8254.quality: 0 > > The "mask" here actually makes more sense displayed in hex. One > can of course use: > > $ sysctl -x kern.timecounter.tc.i8254 > kern.timecounter.tc.i8254.mask: 0x0000ffff > kern.timecounter.tc.i8254.counter: 0x0000786c > kern.timecounter.tc.i8254.frequency: 0x00000000001234de > kern.timecounter.tc.i8254.quality: 0000000000 > > but now the mask is shown in hex (yay) but the others are shown > in hex too (boo). Exactly. I would support bringing the XINT variants back. Note that you would not want to revert the above commit, but you would want to make the XINT variants use a format of "X" and then fix sysctl(8) to handle "X" formats again. -- John Baldwin
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