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Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 18:54:46 +1000
From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Message-Id: <199610010854.SAA20352@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
To: dyson@FreeBSD.org, jehamby@lightside.com
Subject: Re: PS broke again -- what has to be rebuilt to stop this?
Cc: chuckr@glue.umd.edu, hackers@FreeBSD.org, karl@Mcs.Net
Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org
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>Hey, why don't we build on the KernFS we already have?  Let's see:

Because sysctl already does things better than kernfs.

>hamby1# mount -t kernfs kern /kern	# This command always works
>					# (kernfs is an LKM)
>hamby1# ls /kern
>bootfile	copyright	hz		pagesize 	time
>boottime        hostname        loadavg         physmem         version

sysctl kern.bootfile
sysctl kern.boottime
[no copyright under sysctl]
sysctl kern.hostname
sysctl kern.clockrate
sysctl vm.loadavg
sysctl hw.pagesize
sysctl hw.physmem
sysctl hw.usermem
[no time under sysctl - use gettimeofday()]
sysctl kern.vers

I think the main advantage of kernfs is that it is more efficient in
shell scripts.  Running sysctl(8) to fetch a value from the kernel
and format it nicely takes a while.

Bruce