From owner-freebsd-current Thu Jun 3 21:52:40 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from alcanet.com.au (border.alcanet.com.au [203.62.196.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7F38314D9E for ; Thu, 3 Jun 1999 21:52:33 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jeremyp@gsmx07.alcatel.com.au) Received: by border.alcanet.com.au id <40321>; Fri, 4 Jun 1999 14:36:22 +1000 Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 14:52:18 +1000 From: Peter Jeremy Subject: sysctl To: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Message-Id: <99Jun4.143622est.40321@border.alcanet.com.au> Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I notice that sysctl -d doesn't work, and I suspect it never did. Looking at the code, sbin/sysctl/sysctl.c uses MIB {0,5} to request the description of a variable, but the code in sys/kern/kern_sysctl.c only supports {0,0} through {0,4}. Additionally, the macro SYSCTL_OID doesn't reference the description string. I recall some months ago, there was a discussion about the description strings, but I don't think it went anywhere. My feeling is that the description strings should be put into an ELF segment which isn't loaded - sysctl(3) would return an offset into that segment and it would be up to the caller to extract the string from the relevent section of kern.bootfile. I know this is all relatively easy, but my system seems to be missing elf(5) :-), so I'm not sure of the details. kern_sysctl.c also states: * This interface is under work and consideration, and should probably * be killed with a big axe by the first person who can find the time. Is anyone actually working on this? Peter To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message