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Date:      Thu, 4 Jun 1998 17:32:17 -0600
From:      Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com>
To:        dyson@FreeBSD.ORG
Cc:        nate@mt.sri.com (Nate Williams), mike@smith.net.au, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: kernfs/procfs questions...
Message-ID:  <199806042332.RAA05525@mt.sri.com>
In-Reply-To: <199806042243.RAA00404@dyson.iquest.net>
References:  <199806042233.QAA04941@mt.sri.com> <199806042243.RAA00404@dyson.iquest.net>

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> > > You aren't clear *which* sysctl should go away.  If you mean sysctl(8), I
> > > hope you will be removing gdb, nm, hexdump, etc. as well, as these are 
> > > all user-unfriendly tools designed for studying and/or adjusting the 
> > > state of complex, undocumented things.
> > 
> > But users aren't expected to use gdb/nm/hexdump, but sysctl is.  Many of
> > these parameters *should* be tweaked to get better performance, avoid
> > errors, etc...
> >
> Only some of them, if any.

Again I say, if they're not meant to be touched, then don't expose
them.  It's stupid to expose something that is useless for 99.9% of the
population.

It's not my place to enforce, but if it were I'd start removing any
sysctl's that weren't documented/used.  As Mike pointed out in private
email, there are 434 sysctl nodes in our system, and 20 of them are
documented one way or the other.  The rest are magic.

I think of sysctl as a bunch of big global variable, or OPTIONS in the
kernel config file.  If it isn't documented, it isn't needed.

Do I have permission to start removing sysctl's that aren't
documented/used?




Nate

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