On Dec 2, 2005, at 6:14 AM, Elad Efrat wrote:

> sysctl is an interface, and I see sysctl(8) as the control program for
> knobs that don't justify their own control program. In the future, I'm
> hoping to use sysctl entirely in netstat(1), but not collapsing
> netstat's functionality into sysctl(8)...

sysctl's use to e.g. read PCBs etc. is really because we don't have  
another "good" way of doing it without groveling /dev/kmem.  (It has  
a side benefit of having an explicit packing routine in the kernel so  
that the information can be send back in an ABI-neutral way.)

I don't really like how we overload sysctl in this way.  Mach  
messages are a much better way of doing this type of request/response  
operation.  But we don't have Mach messaging, so we overloaded sysctl.

-- thorpej