Date: Wed, 3 Jun 1998 15:59:49 -0500 (CDT) From: Ty Sarna <tsarna@endicor.com> To: woods@zeus.leitch.com, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: hardware monitor device drivers / kernel support (eg. LM78) Message-ID: <199806032059.PAA02826@fezzik.endicor.com> References: <199806031952.PAA19479@brain.zeus.leitch.com>
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In article <199806031952.PAA19479@brain.zeus.leitch.com>,
Greg A. Woods <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org, tech-kern@NetBSD.ORG,
port-i386@NetBSD.ORG, woods@zeus.leitch.com> wrote:
> [[ Please feel free to trim out any cross posting as appropriate, but
> please do include <woods@zeus.leitch.com> in any replies. ]]
I trimmed port-i386... tech-kern seems most appropriate.
> I'm about to embark on adding kernel support for hardware monitoring.
Hooray! I thought about doing this, since the LM78 seems reasonably
simple, but got bogged down in the issues you raise below.
> My preference is to implement this as a virtual filesystem, however in
> structure it would be extremely similar to a sysctl interface, and since
> I've never really liked sysctl in the first place I'm thinking of
> combining these two ideas and simply adding a full sysctl interface to
> kernfs, complete with additional support for what could hopefully be a
> fairly generic hardware monitor "MIB".
This is the problem with sysctl: it really wants to be a filesystem,
IMO, but there is sufficient political opposition I don't think it'll
happen.
In more detail: sysctl really wants to deal with named rather than
numbered things, and wants to do that with more dynamicism than the
current sysctl offers. We already have a resonably good system for
managing a hierarchichal, named system of things, which can change at
run time (namely, files). I don't see why it wouldn't be in the best
UN*X traditions to use that existing subsystem for sysctls. But the
wrong people do :-(
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