Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2007 07:37:33 +0200 From: Alexander Leidinger <Alexander@Leidinger.net> To: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> Cc: Rui Paulo <rpaulo@fnop.net>, Shteryana, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>, "Constantine A. Murenin" <cnst@freebsd.org>, Shopova <syrinx@freebsd.org>, Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org>, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Porting OpenBSD's sysctl hw.sensors framework to FreeBSD Message-ID: <20070713073733.3yk6m2vec0cs88sw@webmail.leidinger.net> In-Reply-To: <200707121404.34168.jhb@freebsd.org> References: <55754.1184143579@critter.freebsd.dk> <200707111145.27741.jhb@freebsd.org> <20070712090008.yc6d6zptwkow04oc@webmail.leidinger.net> <200707121404.34168.jhb@freebsd.org>
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Quoting John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> (from Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:04:33 -0400): > On Thursday 12 July 2007 03:00:08 am Alexander Leidinger wrote: >> Quoting John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> (from Wed, 11 Jul 2007 > 11:45:26 -0400): >> >> > On Wednesday 11 July 2007 07:49:59 am Alexander Leidinger wrote: >> >> >> On the other hand you don't want to allow an userland tool to directly >> >> mess around with the registers on your RAID or NIC to get some status... >> > >> > Err, that's how all the RAID utilities I've used work. They send firmware >> > commands from userland and parse the replies in userland. One exception > I've >> >> That's sad... they should provide this functionality in the driver >> instead, it would allow to use access restrictions for some parts. > > Not really, it avoids having to duplicate a lot of work in drivers > that can be > written once in a cross-platform userland utility. Drivers aren't really the If the sensor querying is already cross-platform, it can also be used in the kernel. You have the driver just call the cross-platform function to get back a firmware command it then can send to the hardware. > place to be monitoring raid status sending pages, e-mails, etc. It's best to > let userland invoke sendmail, not the kernel. :) I fully agree, but nobody wants to send mails from the kernel. We just want to get the sensor data out of the kernel without the possibility to fuck up the device from userland. You don't have a userland tool for each NIC (which you need if you go the cross-platform-tool way), we have a well defined interface there which allows to get back some sensor data (wire speed, MAC address, IP address(es), ...) already and we display it in ifconfig. There's one tool to query it (ifconfig), and nobody complains about it being hard to do it in the driver instead of in a cross-platform userland tool (and Sam enhanced ifconfig to be able to get rid of the special tools for each WLAN NIC, and everybody was happy about this). The sensors framework tries to accomplish the same for sensor data. A driver (or something else in the kernel) registers himself with the sensor framework, and then you can use a generic tool to query all sensor data. No need to reinvent the wheel (how to export, how to name, what unit to use), and a good consistency (e.g. units used). >> > seen so far is that for software RAID the firmware you are talking to is > the >> > driver, not firmware on the card, so you use ioctls directly rather than > an >> > ioctl that sends a command to the firmware on the card. >> >> But you have to run this tool as root, don't you? You don't want to >> let a user run such a tool (and nowadays even desktops start to have >> RAID, so whoever sits at the machine may be interested to see some >> status on his desktop). > > Whatever talks directly to the driver needs to run as root, yes, but > you could > always write a proxy app that receives requests from utilities running as > non-root and does its own access restrictions. That's a lot of infrastructure you want to create for such a simple task as displaying "resyncing 50% done" or "0 hotspares" or similar... Bye, Alexander. -- In Christianity, a man may have only one wife. This is called Monotony. http://www.Leidinger.net Alexander @ Leidinger.net: PGP ID = B0063FE7 http://www.FreeBSD.org netchild @ FreeBSD.org : PGP ID = 72077137
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