From owner-cvs-all  Mon Nov 15  2:45:32 1999
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To: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Cc: Peter Wemm <peter@netplex.com.au>,
	Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>,
	Kazutaka YOKOTA <yokota@FreeBSD.org>, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org,
	cvs-all@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/sys/dev/syscons scmouse.c src/sys/i386/conf options.i386 src/sys/alpha/conf options.alpha 
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 12:44:21 +0200
From: Mark Murray <mark@grondar.za>
Sender: owner-cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG
Precedence: bulk

> Similarly for sysctls, except the code is so much nastier that we have a
> special program to support them in userland and special macros to hide
> the details in the kernel.

One program that hadles (or should handle) all sysctls.

> > cases like this, that ends up being horrors like rndcontrol(8). One
> > of the nice things about UNIX is its extremely general-purpose tools,
> > and these one-off ioctl-drivers break that.
> 
> What's horrible about it?
> 
>     $ rndcontrol
>     rndcontrol: interrupts in use: 11
>     $ rndcontrol -s 14
>     rndcontrol: setting irq 14
>     rndcontrol: interrupts in use: 11 14

It only does /dev/random ioctls.

> is preferable to:
> 
>     $ sysctl dev.random.irqs
>     0x2000
>     $ sysctl -w $(($((1 << 14)) | $(sysctl -n dev.random.irqs)))
>     0x6000

But this would be even better:

sysctl dev.random.irqs.string   (or if you don't like that syntax)
sysctl -s dev.random.irqs       (or something; sysctl(1) does need work)

and

sysctl -w dev.random.irqs.${N}=1
sysctl -w dev.random.irqs.${M}=0

> Sysctls are more natural for devices like /dev/random that only have
> one minor, but one of the nice things about unix is that all devices
> are controlled in the same way :-).

/dev/random is going to be driven by Schneier's "Yarrow" algorithm,
and there are lots of tweakables. The ioctl() interface is on the
shortlist for destruction.

M
--
Mark Murray
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