Trading off safety and performance in the kernel

Posted May 14, 2015 18:48 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Trading off safety and performance in the kernel by zlynx
Parent article: Trading off safety and performance in the kernel

> Common hardware would be recognized and their sensors properly labeled instead of "temp1" and "fan2."

Aside from on-die CPU sensors, there is no such thing as "common hardware" when it comes to sensors.

All Linux can do is provide the raw data and any exposed hooks to control the system. Which it already does. The rest is purely policy, and that's ultimately up to the user, with initial policy configured by the system builder/integrator.

As for displaying sensor data, I've had that data displayed on my desktop for fifteen years or so. And that's all that can be done without customizing the policy for each and every special snowflake of a system.

Trading off safety and performance in the kernel

Posted May 14, 2015 21:29 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (2 responses)

> Aside from on-die CPU sensors, there is no such thing as "common hardware" when it comes to sensors.

Somebody should -- I know that means that I should do it but no time and not enough interest -- should build a CDDB type system for Linux hardware so that for each machine type it is enough for ONE person to label everything in the system. Sensors, audio ports, etc.

Then on system setup the distro could look up all of that stuff.

Trading off safety and performance in the kernel

Posted May 14, 2015 23:34 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

good luck. How are you going to reliably identify what system you are running on? With some vendors even the exact model number isn't enough because they change the internals without changing the model number

Trading off safety and performance in the kernel

Posted May 15, 2015 4:33 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

CDDB is not 100% reliable but it's useful and popular anyway.

At the start it was very incomplete yet it became popular very quickly. Same as many other crowd-sourced services.