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Date:      Fri, 23 Mar 2001 20:11:03 +0100
From:      Adrian Chadd <adrian@FreeBSD.ORG>
To:        Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.ORG>
Cc:        "Alexey V. Neyman" <avn@any.ru>, "Michael C . Wu" <keichii@peorth.iteration.net>, fs@FreeBSD.ORG, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: tuning a VERY heavily (30.0) loaded s cerver
Message-ID:  <20010323201103.A5828@roaming.cacheboy.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1010323083844.26010C-100000@fledge.watson.org>; from rwatson@FreeBSD.ORG on Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 08:44:09AM -0500
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.33.0103230044500.11016-100000@srv2.any> <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1010323083844.26010C-100000@fledge.watson.org>

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On Fri, Mar 23, 2001, Robert Watson wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 23 Mar 2001, Alexey V. Neyman wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 22 Mar 2001, Michael C . Wu wrote:
> > 
> > >(Why is vfs.vmiodirenable=1 not enabled by default?)
> > By the way, is there any all-in-one-place description of sysctl tuneables?
> > Looking all the man pages and collecting notices about MIB variables seems
> > rather tiresome and, I think, pointless. I doubt if they are all
> > documented in man pages.
> 
> sysctl(3) describes a number of the constant-named sysctl variables, and a
> number of sysctl's are described in the man pages associated with the
> features tweaked by the sysctl's.  For example, the jail(8) man page
> describes the jail.* namespace.  However, you're right that there are vast
> hoards of under-documented sysctl's.  That said, probably only the
> "tweakable" (writable) sysctl's need to be documented in the general case,
> since many are used for the sole purpose of exporting kernel data for
> supported interfaces, whereas the sysctl's are subject to change.  For
> example, a large number of read-only sysctl's were introduced to support
> the non-setgid-kmem operation of top, systat, and various other *stat's
> recently.  Also, many sysctl's are "self-documenting", in that the
> declaration of the sysctl macros in-kernel include a description field.  I
> don't think sysctl(8) currently knows how to read that field, but if you
> look at the SYSCTL definitions in the kernel source, they're probably a
> decent starting point.  A magic script to extract the sysctl names, types,
> and descriptions might be useful..

A while back I started running through the undocumented sysctls and
documenting them. I didn't get through all of them, and the main reason
I stopped was because there wasn't a nifty way to extract the sysctls
short of writing a script to extract them from /usr/src.

Someone did point out that you could stuff the sysctl's into an elf
segment and only load it when needed, but I don't know much about elf.
If someone would like to do this, I'm sure a small group of us
(Asmodai? :-P) could walk the sysctl tree again and figure out what
the undocumented sysctls are. :-)




adrian

-- 
Adrian Chadd			"Programming is like sex:
<adrian@freebsd.org>		   One mistake and you have to support for
				    a lifetime." -- rec.humor.funny


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