vmstat -i and systat -vm interrupt reporting on CAMBRIA and AVILA

[Ian Lepore]

On Mon, 2014-07-07 at 21:44 +0200, John Hay wrote:
> Hi Guys,
> 
> While looking for my atheros problems, I noticed that there seems to
> be some reporting problem with interrupts on CAMBRIA and AVILA or
> maybe my expectations are wrong. I see:
> 
> :~ # vmstat -i
> interrupt                          total       rate
> Total                              67723        130
> :~ #
> 
> And for systat -vm on the righthand side I see:
> 
> Interrupts
> 126 total
> 100
>   6
>  20
> 
> For vmstat -i I would have expected a breakdown of the interrupts with
> their names, totoal and rate. Not just a Total. Systat seems to find
> a little more with the 3 numbers, but also cannot find the names?
> 
> Regards
> 
> John

I wonder if this could be related to the changes HPS made recently to
sysctl?  vmstat -i gets its info through sysctl, and it's a particularly
perverse conspiracy of agreement between kernel and userland on how to
interpret a binary blob of sysctl data that contains a variable length
table of variable length strings, as I vaguely recall it.

-- Ian