Is describing sysctl variables useful?

[David Wolfskill]

At work, I'm trying to get some measurements for what is going on on
various systems, especially when developers are trying to use them.
(The goal is to improve the situation; measurement is a rather early
step in that process.)

To that end, I've cobbled up a Perl script that acts as a "wrapper"
around time(1) and uses that command to obtain the "rusage" (ref.
getrusage(2)) information about the command in question.

I've started to expand this to try to obtain information about the
machine as a whole, in order to allow a comparison of the results
from one run of a command to another to have some plausible meaning.

For this, I thought that certain values reported by sysctl(8) might
be of use.

In the process of starting to investigate this, I noted that while
some of the variables have decscriptions (ref. "sysctl -d"), others lack
them.

Since I'm likely to be sniffing around to figure out what these things
are, would it be a useful exercise for me to submit PRs  (in
appropriately-sized chunks) to provide such descriptions?

I have no desire to submit PRs merely for the exercise; I've submitted
PRs before, so I'm unlikely to do it merely for the sake of novelty.  :-}

But if it stands a reasonable chance of being a useful thing for the
project, I'm happy to help.

Thoughts?

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
I submit that "conspiracy" would be an appropriate collective noun for cats.

See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key.
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