Subject: Re: hardware monitor device drivers / kernel support (eg. LM78)
To: None <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org, port-i386@NetBSD.ORG, tech-kern@NetBSD.ORG,>
From: Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com>
List: port-i386
Date: 06/03/1998 13:33:27
I have on my middle burner a environmental services driver to port
into both NetBSD and FreeBSD (and possibly linux). It will manage
both SES (SCSI Environmental Services) and SAF-TE (see http://www.safte.org).

One of the things that has blocked me from just doing it (the driver's
been done under solaris for quite some time- I just have to really port
it- it's a pretty trivail driver) is I'm not sure what context to report
environmental info in- I *know* that it will go to SNMP mib at some point,
but I'm sure there are intermediate states that are worthwhile. I was
assuming only a character interface that would retrieve SES-like objects
(they are quite a number of them- enough to possibly manage most of even
a bacplane monitor). I had also been puzzling about how to integrate I2C
bus support with this since a number of systems (e.g., the alpha 41000)
have I2C support for internal temperature sensors.

It sounds like you're doing something related. Is it possible that we
could integrate these various sources of environmental (which include
both the notion of alarms to be read and reset as well as LEDs to blink,
and so on- see under http://www.symbios.com/x3t10 for the final draft
SES specification) into one common format so the applications won't have
to untangle this?

-matt