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Date:      Fri, 9 Nov 2007 21:03:43 +0200
From:      Nikolay Pavlov <qpadla@gmail.com>
To:        Alexander Leidinger <Alexander@leidinger.net>
Cc:        cnst@freebsd.org, arch@freebsd.org, rwatson@freebsd.org, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org, imp@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: sensors framework continued (architecture)
Message-ID:  <200711092103.48652.qpadla@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20071109185741.13930f0b@deskjail>
References:  <20071109124421.3c1901b1@deskjail> <200711091851.19445.qpadla@gmail.com> <20071109185741.13930f0b@deskjail>

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On Friday 09 November 2007 19:57:41 Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> This was addressed further down in the text (the part which you didn't
> quote here). The official user interface to the sensors from userland
> would be the userland library. As we are an open source OS, we can not
> hide something, we can only declare something as an official interface,
> or an internal interface. sysctl would allow to export the data in an
> hierarchical and unified way. sysctl is a well tested and working
> interface in FreeBSD to export data from the kernel to the userland.
>
> If or if not there are much changes and extensions in an incompatible
> way, can not be determined in such a high level architectural
> discussion. To be able to talk about this, we have to got more towards
> the implementation direction. But anyway, the userland access library
> we envision so far is supposed to handle this gracefully.
>
> The implicit question we answered here is, if we invent a new interface
> or augment an existing and well tested interface with some meta
> information in a subtree. So far it looks we want to use existing
> interfaces (a sysctl subtree for the data and devctl for notifications).
>
> What such an hierarchical and MIB like interface allows is, that you
> can get the notification "event sensor X switched to a critical value"
> and directly poll the value in an easy way. If, for example, you want
> to produce something similar via a pseudo-filesystem, you have to
> actually write a filesystem. This is a more complex task to get right
> than to use the functions in the kernel to handle sysctls. It also
> involves more processing in the kernel (mounting, VFS
> interaction, ...). With procfs we learned that a filesystem for
> something like this is hard to get right. After switching from procfs
> to sysctl's to gather data for top/ps/..., we noticed that it is more
> easy to get right via sysctl's, and that sysctl's are a good interface
> to export such data from the kernel.

Then it's ok for me :)=20
But i think you should drop some unrealistic requirements:
Please do not define some event-latency thresholds here. So if it's to=20
complicated to handle in kernel event triggers, just let the daemons do=20
the job. FreeBSD is not RT OS in any way.=20
An RFC already mentioned above show a good example of how the data could be=
=20
exported to another world via SNMP (you can even generate traps via BSNMPD=
=20
daemon), let's do not invent yet another "Group-level sensors framework".=20
I am bit sceptic of it. So as an admin i would be happy with a daemon that=
=20
could write some logs and trigger events, utility that could show current=20
stats and SNMP MIB that could be listed via network. This just my=20
requirements for sensors framework as a black box :)=20
Thanks.

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=2D Best regards, Nikolay Pavlov. <<<-----------------------------------   =
=20
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