Bruce Riddle wrote:
> Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>> 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.
>>
> Whilst I have a sometimes love hat relationship with picl I think it
> is the right place for "platform" as it always references libraries
> from /platform/`uname -i`. The problem may be that i86pc or x64 is
> probably too generice for picld use. I think it would need to get
> much more specific.
Btw, this points out, IMO, that i386 really have no meaningful uname -i
output. I think that certain OEM vendors (or folks that wanted to
support certain platforms) could create "ports" for specific hardware if
there was a demand. Of course, the reality is probably that almost all
PC hardware is so generic with common standards like ACPI that the
platform has little need for a switch like uname -i gives.
Even Sun's own x86/amd64 hardware seems not to take advantage of uname -i.
It _would_ be nice if prtdiag gave meaningful output on x86, I admit. :-)
-- Garrett
>
> syshwd certainly sounds interesting. What drives those alerts?
>
>
>
--
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
