Subject: sysctl granularity guidelines?
To: None <tech-kern@netbsd.org>
From: David Young <dyoung@pobox.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 04/09/2004 12:45:13
Can anybody suggest principles of sysctl granularity? Even if they are
purely extemporaneous, I think that it will help.  I ask because I am
mulling this idea of exposing the ieee80211 node database using sysctl,
but I'm still not sure what the granularity should be.

Just to give you some idea what the dilemma is, there are a bunch of
fields in each client/peer's ieee80211_node structure that I would like
for somebody to be able to examine.  I had thought at first that a user
would examine them with sysctl -a, but that's really a very bushy sysctl
tree, with lots of sysctl_node overhead!  So I thought that I would
expose all the essential variables using an ieee80211_node_ex. But how
to index that?  I could put paths into the sysctl tree containing the
BSSID and MAC,

	hw.wi0.nodes.02:0a:2f:39:48.00:2d:aa:fe:50.<ieee80211_node_ex>

That helps random access to the nodes (I have in mind a daemon that will
need random access), however, there is still the sysctl_node overhead.

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung@ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933