Is describing sysctl variables useful?

[Niki Denev]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 11:26 PM, David Wolfskill <david at catwhisker.org> wrote:
> 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.
>

Hi David,

There is such project on the project ideas page :
http://www.freebsd.org/projects/ideas/#p-docsysctl

Maybe you can ping the listed technical contacts...

Regards,
Niki