Common interface for sensors/health monitoring

[Alexander Leidinger]

On Sat, 22 Aug 2009 08:50:23 +0200 Marc Balmer <marc at msys.ch> wrote:

> The OpenBSD sensors framework lacks some desireable features, e.g.  
> event capabilities like getting an event if a certain threshold is  
> exceeded.  And it propbably was used for things that it better had

This assumes the kernel is monitoring the device periodically (in the
general case, as there are a lot of dump sensors which do not send
events on their own). The framework as in the SoC did not provide this
feature to keep the kernel part simple. You want to see a value, you
poll the kernel for it, and the userland would have been responsible to
fire up an event.

For smart sensors which trigger an event on their own (interrupt), you
can use the exiting kernel event framework (and the idea in the SoC
was to use it for such sensors). The devd is the userland side of it.

> not (yes, I am culprit for on of these (ab)uses...).
> 
> I am sure these features could be added if only the code was in the  
> tree to hack on...

The event stuff is in the kernel, go ahead and write a driver for your
smart sensor which fires events on its own.

Bye,
Alexander.