Subject: Re: systat vmstat disk widths
To: Simon Burge <simonb@wasabisystems.com>
From: David Brownlee <abs@netbsd.org>
List: tech-misc
Date: 08/08/2002 18:21:09
	systat has been updated to use the new humanize_number(), (thanks
	to Simon for the suggestion and Tomas Svensson for the code :)

On Thu, 8 Aug 2002, Simon Burge wrote:

> Other things that come to mind are auto-scaling the widths of the
> columns based on the number of disk devices, and perhaps some heuristic
> to weed out devices that aren't really used (cd0, fd0 and md0 in your
> example).

	It would seem to make sense to sort the devices as used in
	iostat, systat, vmstat and friends. It doesn't make sense to
	throw away cd0 and fd0 is you have space for them, but you
	really ought to make sure you display raid0 before them in
	case you run out of space. iostat is a classic example of this.

	The question is where to do the sorting?

	On a random system here sysctl reports:
	    hw.disknames = wd0 wd1 fd0 md0 raid1 raid2

	To my mind any consumer of this information probably wants
	fd0 md0 after raid1 raid2 (or doesn't care), so does it make
	sense to sort inside the kernel? This has issues with disks
	being added and removed, but you have that anyway if you hook
	up two hotpluggable devices and then remove the first.

	The sort order would probably be:
		- md* last
		- fd* next to last
		- cd* next to fd*
		- Then ccd* and raid*?
		- For the remainder, alphabetical?


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