Porting OpenBSD's sysctl hw.sensors framework to FreeBSD

[John-Mark Gurney]

Alexander Leidinger wrote this message on Wed, Jul 11, 2007 at 19:51 +0200:
> Quoting "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> (Wed, 11 Jul 2007 17:33:51 +0000):
> > There is no benefit from having it in the kernel.
> 
> You need to get some information out of the kernel somehow (you cut
> this part of my mail). And as far as I understand the high level
> description (presentation in the net) of this framework, this does this
> in an unified way. Do you propose to get the information out of the
> kernel in a non-uniform way?

No you don't.  The kernel is just another "transport" layer so to say..

We are proposing a unified way via a userland front end...  The userland
library knows and can adapt to different ways of extracting the data..
If you hard code the kernel interface, when someone comes along and
wants to write a complicated sensor in userland, he will then need to
hack a "kernel frontend" to take his userland generated data, shove it
into the kernel, just for another userland app to pull the data out..

I've thought about making a userland cdev interface so that we can
emulate "v4l" in userland...  If the v4l was a userland interface,
I wouldn't need to add such a hack to the kernel..

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."