Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> There are probably other ideas besides. :-)  The point is, almost
> anything is better then groveling.  Maybe a dedicated i2c bitbang
> interface might be worse than groveling.  But not much.

Until this morning I would have said the same thing, but Nathan Williams
and Matthew Green both got me thinking with their reminders that most of
these utilities /do need to retain/ their fearsome groveling powers in
order to be useful on dumps ... and that means if they are using some
other interface to talk with the running kernel, there comes an eternal
maintenance issue of ensuring the two interfaces are updated in parallel,
kept in sync, and the dump functionality doesn't rot. It makes me think
there's one real advantage to ksyms: you're saved needing to know the
actual kernel file (which is nuthin' but trouble), but you get to keep
a lot of your code unforked between the dump and live-kernel cases.

Of course the big advantage of sysctl is the nodes can be active, so
they can do useful things like lock structures and give you a consistent
snapshot of something (obviously not an issue with a dump). No doubt that's
necessary in many cases.  But maybe in some cases where something is
using ksyms and working, the rush to go fix it can be a moderate, cautious
rush.

Just another memo from the Dept. of Vacillation...

-Chap