Re: a maze of twisty stats, most different

[Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>]

> That works ok for some things, like new global counters, but some
> items really fit best in existing files and the concern there is about
> other uses of them beyond the standard tools.
>         Examples:
> -addition of route age in /proc/net/route and /proc/net/ipv6_route

Routing information belongs into netlink imho. The /proc setup
for it already only shows a small subset of it. Netlink is easily
extensible -- just add new headers.

> -per-group data in /proc/net/igmp & igmp6

Don't know.  But you can probably just add more fields there,
multicasting is not exactly something that a lot of people care about
so there are likely not many scripts that might get broken.

> -per-interface MLD MIB info, which ought to go with other per-interface 
> data

ethtool ?  It's also extensible, although you have to change
the userland. But I don't think there is a risk of someone's script
breaking.

> 
>         I think everything that uses this kind of interface ought to do
> label matching, so additional columns in a row (anywhere in the row)
> would just be skipped/ignored by things that don't understand them,
> and similarlarly for single-row tagged items. You can do that in scripts
> with awk, but if existing items don't, they'll break.

I would expect shell scripts to generally do netstat -s | ..., which
is easily matchable.


-Andi> 
>