From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Nov 22 8:51:19 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mailhub.fokus.gmd.de (mailhub.fokus.gmd.de [193.174.154.14]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C2E6D37B419 for ; Thu, 22 Nov 2001 08:51:16 -0800 (PST) Received: from beagle (beagle [193.175.132.100]) by mailhub.fokus.gmd.de (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id fAMGpAr25963; Thu, 22 Nov 2001 17:51:10 +0100 (MET) Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2001 17:51:10 +0100 (CET) From: Harti Brandt To: Joerg Micheel Cc: Mike Meyer , Subject: Re: sysctls for hardware monitoring? In-Reply-To: <20011123054328.A8944@cs.waikato.ac.nz> Message-ID: <20011122174502.R401-100000@beagle.fokus.gmd.de> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Fri, 23 Nov 2001, Joerg Micheel wrote: JM>On Thu, Nov 22, 2001 at 12:08:16PM +0100, Harti Brandt wrote: JM>> It's just annoying to need a special program to get at the values. For JM>> some parts of the MIB, like the interface MIB, even sysctl doesn't help - JM>> you need to write a program to look at these. I still think, its easier to JM>> read the fan speed by cat(1)-ing a file, than to fire up a special JM>> program for this. JM> JM>It really is user convenience against kernel bloat. I have a Linux JM>device driver which tries to provice a /proc entry. The amount of JM>printf() style crap in there is really disgusting and it does not even JM>report half of what it should. I've long ago decided that for anything JM>other than the trivial case a binary interface is the only way one can JM>deal with these situations. It is unfortunate for the few of us who JM>like Plan9, but how big a bitter pill are you prepared to swallow. Files don't have to be ascii, do they? There is hexdump and other stuff. And, reporting fan speed and temperature doesn't seem to be the case for a complicated binrary interface. Taking a Linux driver to argue against something doesn't really make sense. There is so many crap in the Linux kernel, that you can argue against anything: "The crappy unix domain sockets don't work in Linux. Oh yeah, they are a bad idea anyway..." harti -- harti brandt, http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/cats/employees/hartmut.brandt/private brandt@fokus.fhg.de To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message