Subject: Re: Replacing the sysctl() interface.
To: Aaro J Koskinen <akoskine@cc.helsinki.fi>
From: Darren Reed <darrenr@reed.wattle.id.au>
List: tech-kern
Date: 06/05/2000 23:07:43
In some email I received from Aaro J Koskinen, sie wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Jun 100, Darren Reed wrote:
> 
> > - do lookups on name, not integer (except for backward compat.)
> [...]
> >   other properties for nodes I'm thinking of are "ownership" (based
> >   on user/group) and permissions (rwxrwxrwx) so you can setup read
> >   only, read-write and write only sysctl nodes.
> 
> Sounds like a file system. How about removing sysctl() altogether, and
> putting everything under kernfs as a file?

The idea being that you can do (for example):

# echo 1 > /kern/sysctl/net/inet/ip/ip_forwarding

to enable IP forwarding, as well as the usual file ops. ?
I don't want to say "no", but I'd want a fairly large consensus on that
sort of thing before doing so.  I see that sort of thing as a Linuxism,
which may be good or bad.  I guess this _isn't_ procfs (unlike Linux :).

Darren