GSoC project: Make optional kernel subsystems register themselves via sysctl

[Ilya Bakulin]

Hi list,
I participate in GSoC this summer, so I want to announce my project.  Project details may be found at FreeBSD wiki, [1].
Completing this project will make it easy to get current kernel feature set from the userland, thus simplifying writing system administration scripts, autoconfigurating Ports, jailed packages building jobs, etc.
My experience with FreeBSD includes using it as the main OS for both servers and work PCs. This includes solving problems with buggy ACPI, helping some FreeBSD developers to test their code on my hardware, tuning our company's FreeBSD servers. I maintain several ports in FreeBSD Ports Collection. Also I was working with FreeBSD/ARM for some time (this includes developing custom firmware for the proprietary AT91RM9200-based device, done together with Stanislav Sedov, and driver code for Marvell 88F5182 SATA controller -- work done for Semihalf. It was committed to FreeBSD-CURRENT last summer).
 
According to suggested timeline described at [1], now it's time to decide what kernel subsystems need to be registered this way, and how this registration may be overriden.
The interesting question is: should modules register themselves under kern.features tree? For example, USB support may be either compiled into kernel or loaded as a module at runtime. In the first case it seems to be a good idea to register it under kern.features. The main goal is not to rely on "kldstat -v" to get compiled-in modules.
Other need-to-be-registered things are ALTQ support, MAC support, INET/INET6,...
I expect all such sysctls to be boolean: the feature X is either present, in this case "kern.features.X = 1", or not present -- simply no node at kernel.features. But maybe it's not sufficient?  

So I'll be glad to hear your opinion, and hope we all will be able to set "kern.features.the_best_os_ever=1" in our kernel feature sets at the end of the summer :-) Good luck for all GSoC participants!

[1] http://wiki.freebsd.org/SOC2010IlyaBakulin

-- 
Regards,
Ilya Bakulin
http://kibab.com
xmpp://kibab612@jabber.ru
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