From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jun 3 14:00:40 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id OAA01144 for freebsd-hackers-outgoing; Wed, 3 Jun 1998 14:00:40 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from fezzik.endicor.com (root@fezzik.endicor.com [198.17.18.5]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA01024 for ; Wed, 3 Jun 1998 14:00:18 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tsarna@endicor.com) Received: by fezzik.endicor.com (8.9.0/8.9.0) id PAA02826; Wed, 3 Jun 1998 15:59:49 -0500 (CDT) Date: Wed, 3 Jun 1998 15:59:49 -0500 (CDT) From: Ty Sarna Message-Id: <199806032059.PAA02826@fezzik.endicor.com> To: woods@zeus.leitch.com, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Newsgroups: netbsd.tech.kern Subject: Re: hardware monitor device drivers / kernel support (eg. LM78) References: <199806031952.PAA19479@brain.zeus.leitch.com> Organization: Endicor Technologies, Inc., San Antonio, Texas Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In article <199806031952.PAA19479@brain.zeus.leitch.com>, Greg A. Woods wrote: > [[ Please feel free to trim out any cross posting as appropriate, but > please do include 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 :-( To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message