Date: Thu, 04 Jun 1998 12:49:14 -0700 From: Mark Shepard <mns@pobox.com> To: dyson@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: mike@smith.net.au (Mike Smith), dyson@FreeBSD.ORG, jonny@jonny.eng.br, mike@dingo.cdrom.com, mike@smith.net.au, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: kernfs/procfs questions... Message-ID: <199806041951.MAB17978@proxy4.ba.best.com> In-Reply-To: <199806040744.CAA00761@dyson.iquest.net> References: <199806040536.WAA00588@antipodes.cdrom.com>
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I've been a lurker on this list so far, but in a past life I implemented a VFS-like system for NT & 95 (with a sysctl-like management interface), so here's my .02$: There seems to be a conflict between the sysadmins (who want to be able to configure everything with cat/echo) and the applicance/embedded systems people (who want a small kernel and simple consistent programming interfaces). procfs/kernfs is essentially a kernel API in disguise. Considered as an API, sysctl seems "cleaner" and lighter-weight than procfs/kernfs -- there's no need to format/parse ASCII, no need to generate column headers, and FreeBSD's sysctl provides data in a more uniform format than Linux's procfs. Actually, I'm bothered more by the Linux implementation of procfs than by the question of kernfs/procfs vs. sysctl. IMHO, if procfs/kernfs is to be used for more complex data as Linux has done, the format of tables and hierarchical lists should be standardized and a library of parsing routines provided. Hey, perhaps the kernel should just output & accept HTML? After all, HTML/SGML provides _structured_ text and there are pleny of HTML parsing libraries... I can see it now -- HTML forms direct from the kernel. Now that'd be easy to configure :-) Also, no one's mentioned Localization yet -- all the column headers & other fixed strings in the Linux procfs are in English. Translating these to other languages might break programs which read procfs (column positions might change, etc.) So procfs doesn't magically remove the need for a UI front-end program to view config. variables, unless you ignore localization. Regards, Mark Shepard mns@pobox.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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