Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2020 21:22:18 -0800 From: Ihor Antonov <ihor@antonovs.family> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Documentation for sysctl MIBs Message-ID: <20200127052218.3icxzqtxnbm6raa3@sea-ll-10936>
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Hi everyone, Various manuals and FreeBSD Handbook often instruct user to tweak kernel parameters with sysctl to achieve something. Although the explanation of what exactly given parameter is doing is often omitted. As a curious person I don't like to follow manual blindly and I always try to understand what am I doing. So I started looking for documentation of sysctl MIB's, hoping that rumors that "FreeBSD is famous for its good and extensive documentation" will turn out to be true. Unfortunately after days of searching and reading the best answer I could find is sysctl -d There is no documented list of MIBs and sysctl -d often gives very brief one-line explanations, which often create more question. Sometimes there is no explanation at all: # sysctl -d hw.acpi.suspend_state hw.acpi.suspend_state: I have Absolute FreeBSD book on my table, it also does not provide much insight into how a user can get more information about sysctl MIBs. So my question to the community: how do you understand what given MIB is doing? Where to find more extensive documentation? Is there some kind of framework that would allow a user to understand when and what needs to be tweaked (e.g. how to enable powersaving on my wifi card? is this bootloader tunable? kernel parameter? rc.conf? ...) P.S. Here are example articles that explain how to get FreeBSD running on laptops, but what is never explained is how did the author come up with all these tweaks: https://genneko.github.io/playing-with-bsd/hardware/freebsd-on-thinkpad-t480/ https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/freebsd-on-a-laptop/
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