I've been trying to figure out what we need to do, in order to get all
of the functionality that Tadpole closed-source software offers for
(laptop) platform management, in OpenSolaris.
It seems like a lot of the stuff could be covered with sysevent, but
that doesn't do anything for platform _control_. E.g imagine wanting to
query thermals, or control fan speeds, or backlight brightness.
Looking at servers, it seems "casually" that libpicl is the interface of
choice for this. But yet, the only applications which seem to exist
which use picl are locator (to flash leds) and prtpicl. Nothing for
platform-independent fan speed control, thermal status, etc. Maybe
these are in symon (or whatever snmp GUI folks are using these days?)
Complicating the fact is that, although there are a bunch of libpicl and
libpicltree man pages, I can't find any actual documentation on the
matter. Is it possible to get access to the PSARC case materials for
PICL? Am I looking in the wrong place? Should we invent some new and
different framework for this?
FWIW, Tadpole has a highly tunable software set called "syshwd" that
lets platform administrators tune responses to actions, with a level of
control I've not seen elsewhere. For example, one can express "if
(battery-time-remaining < 5 minutes && external-dc-connected == false)
then { arbitrary commands }". A lot of this can be replaced with good
scripting and some applications to query or modify system properties.
--
Garrett D'Amore, Principal Software Engineer
Tadpole Computer / Computing Technologies Division,
General Dynamics C4 Systems
http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/
Phone: 951 325-2134 Fax: 951 325-2191
