cvs commit: src/sys/kern sched_4bsd.c

[Alfred Perlstein]

* Scott Long <scottl at samsco.org> [060427 10:00] wrote:
> 
> Well, sysctl's are a second class API.  The ease by they can be changed, 
> as well as the completely uncontrolled nature that they are developed 
> in, means that we really start to hamstring ourselves if we declare them
> as a first class API.  What we should do instead is define a subset of
> the sysctl tree that is stable and guaranteed to exist, and declare that
> the rest are transient and therefore not part of the API.  Doing this by
> popular vote is impractical, what we need is someone to sit down and 
> audit what is there now and make appropriate recommendations.  sysctls 
> that are used by libkvm are a good candidate, for example, but random
> driver sysctls might not be.

I think that sysctls should rarely be changed, it really hurts
application developers that will try to build low level system
management software.

Even device drivers should be careful, it would suck for a vendor's
binary code to break for a utility that you are dependant on just
because someone didn't like the spelling of a sysctl.

-- 
- Alfred Perlstein
- CTO Okcupid.com / FreeBSD Hacker / All that jazz -