<Mildly OT rant> Garrett D'Amore > There is a precedent for this approach as well (beyond just ndd's '?'.) > > Look at what cfgadm -x does. Or the new mixerctl features. Both of > these > subsystems reasonably assume that the core operating system can't > necessarily keep track of all the useful tunables, and that there needs > to be a way for the framework to pass such commands to the users. (In > cfgadm's case it even includes help messaging content.) I think these > aren't the only two cases either -- I didn't do an exhaustive search, > these are just the ideas off the top of my head.
How about the "dtrace -l" list of all probes. Certainly 99.99% of them are not useful for administrators who are trying to use the system in a normal way (where there is no performance tuning required, since everything auto-tunes to optimal performance). And how many of the 53098 probes found on my S10u6 box are documented (stable) interfaces? To argue that there is no NEED for an administrator to know about knobs or counters or tunables that control a performance-critical part of the system is to convert that system back into a Black Box-- Just put your data in and hope that it comes out the other side fast enough. If it isn't, there's no hope of fixing it. While you're at it, you might as well take away the -w option from kmdb, or at least the ::nm dcmd. For that matter, why bother with writing the man page to describe these hidden driver options? Just check the source (Or even `strings /kernel/drv/*`) That's good enough for Linux, why should Solaris be better? IMO, the more transparent, tunable, and understandable you make the system, the better it can be. And the more unnecessary you make that manual tuning, the better it will be. --Joe _______________________________________________ networking-discuss mailing list [email protected]
