From owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Jul 10 21:00:33 2007 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CF26E16A421; Tue, 10 Jul 2007 21:00:33 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from ambrisko@ambrisko.com) Received: from mail.ambrisko.com (mail.ambrisko.com [64.174.51.43]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8A89513C48C; Tue, 10 Jul 2007 21:00:33 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from ambrisko@ambrisko.com) Received: from server2.ambrisko.com (HELO www.ambrisko.com) ([192.168.1.2]) by ironport2.ambrisko.com with ESMTP; 10 Jul 2007 13:55:44 -0700 Received: from ambrisko.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by www.ambrisko.com (8.13.1/8.12.11) with ESMTP id l6AL0W8q063339; Tue, 10 Jul 2007 14:00:32 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ambrisko@ambrisko.com) Received: (from ambrisko@localhost) by ambrisko.com (8.13.1/8.13.1/Submit) id l6AL0WPA063338; Tue, 10 Jul 2007 14:00:32 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ambrisko) From: Doug Ambrisko Message-Id: <200707102100.l6AL0WPA063338@ambrisko.com> In-Reply-To: <4693EDFB.5050401@FreeBSD.org> To: "Constantine A. Murenin" Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2007 14:00:32 -0700 (PDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL94b (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Cc: Rui Paulo , Shteryana Shopova , freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Porting OpenBSD's sysctl hw.sensors framework to FreeBSD (was: Re: PERFORCE change 123040 for review) X-BeenThere: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussion related to FreeBSD architecture List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2007 21:00:33 -0000 Constantine A. Murenin writes: | On 10/07/2007 14:33, Doug Ambrisko wrote: | >There are so many different flavours of HW monitoring chips | > and several tools that can read them live in ports. Lots of them are | > slightly different, intefaces can be i2c or direct I/O. | | Please, enlighten me which of these several tools were updated in the | last few years. Most hardware monitoring tools in the ports tree are | outdated and no longer being maintained: xmbmon, healthd, lmmon, | consolehm, wmhm etc. Several of these have a last-modified date of 2000, | that's 7 years ago! Being in the kernel means they get updated? It's so trivial to write this stuff that I've put it in various embedded appliances. There are so many different chips why bother trying to support them all when there is little bang for effort and it add's kernel bloat. | Please note that this framework is not limited to monitoring temperature | and fan speed sensors -- it also allows one to monitor raid array status | and a few other things. | | Moreover, in OpenBSD and NetBSD these kinds of in-kernel frameworks are | used to display ipmi(4) sensors, too. Which is probably a mistake IMHO but atleast has a common interface. Note that talking to IPMI controllers can be rather expensive. Users have to be careful with things talking to IPMI when updating firmware. There are more firmware upgrade tools that use the OpenIPMI interface so they just work with the driver. | Monitoring of remote machines with this framework is also possible -- | with symon from ports. Querying local machines is as easy as running | sysctl or systat, and alerts can be generated through sensorsd. It's trivial to do in other ways as well. Personally, I don't care if someone does it as a project. Personally, I'd recommend it done as a library that has a kernel front end and user land interface. To clarify it could be built as a kernel module or user land tool. Then you have the best of both worlds. This would be trivial to do. I've done something similar with something else. Doug A.