Peter Jeremy writes: >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?
No, not on the interface - I'm working on finishing up the descriptions of a whole heap of sysctl variables. A rather large patch was apparently commited a month or two ago with the beginnings of documenting sysctl variables, but I currently have a lack of time to finish this and consider perhaps attacking the sysctl interface (and a few things I want to fix beforehand..) There was talk of a script being written to walk the /usr/src/sys tree and generate a sysctl descriptions file. Is someone going to be nice enough to do this? :-) Adrian To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message