Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 08:20:39 +1300 From: Andrew Thompson <thompsa@FreeBSD.org> To: Atom Smasher <atom@smasher.org> Cc: FreeBSD-Hackers <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: kenv - output needed Message-ID: <20100323192039.GE45454@citylink.fud.org.nz> In-Reply-To: <1003240736570.40436@smasher> References: <1003231706140.40436@smasher> <20100323180354.GD45454@citylink.fud.org.nz> <1003240736570.40436@smasher>
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On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 08:06:23AM +1300, Atom Smasher wrote: > On Wed, 24 Mar 2010, Andrew Thompson wrote: > >> On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 05:12:47PM +1300, Atom Smasher wrote: >>> i'm trying to figure out what might be reasonable output from kenv. on >>> the three machines that i have access to i'm already seeing wide >>> variations of formatting and usefulness. >>> >>> i'd like to collect as much output as i can get (off-list should be fine) >>> from one of these two commands: >>> >>> 1) preferred: >>> kenv | egrep bios >>> >>> 2) i can also use this: >>> kenv | egrep 'product|maker' >> >> kenv is essentially dumping all the variables set by the bootloader prior >> to starting the kernel. If you want something more structured then maybe >> the dmidecode utility would be useful. > =============== > > structure is cool, but it seems like you're being human-centric in your > reference to structure; i actually want to parse the info with a script, > making kenv preferable. > > i want the ability to run the script without any privileges; again making > kenv preferable. > > so with an unprivileged script, i'm leaning towards kenv to find out what > hardware is running (motherboard & system info, eg "Dell Inc., 0H603H, > PowerEdge 2950" or "Acer, Navarro, Aspire 5100"). > > other than being formatted more nicely (for humans, anyway) and only > running with root privileges, is there any ~real~ difference between the > information i would get from dmidecode rather than kenv (as it relates to > motherboard & system make & model)? it seems like in either case, i'm just > getting the info from smbios... and that info could be good, bad or ugly > regardless of how it's formatted. Yea, both methods get the info from smbios. So back to the original question about reasonable output from kenv, I would expect it to contain all the same basic information that dmidecode fetches. If it is missing something then it is a bug, otherwise that is the data the bios maker has provided and the script will need to handle it. cheers, Andrew
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