On Wednesday 24 May 2006 14:14, Phil Dibowitz wrote: > On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 03:05:54PM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote: > > Phil Dibowitz wrote: > > Given any method of clearing statistics across your cluster, I'm certain > > you can come up with a similar method of obtaining the current statistic > > (the baseline). > > Right, I'm aware there are other ways of doing this - I've written scripts > to record a hundreds of numbers, and then subtract them from each other. > But those scripts are work arounds for a feature _lacking_ in the kernel. A > feature that, as I've mentioned, is supported on any piece of networking > gear (and of course, lets not forget there's a specific option in the > kernel config *just* for "behave like a router"). > > If my patch was invasive and broke things, I would understand the > hesitation, but this is a feature that allows people to *choose* to do this > if they need to and the code is pretty self-contained.
I'm with you - this is a useful feature! But there aren't many other things I've found that can be cleared from the kernel other than by reloading a module, and dmesg -c. I think the object here isn't this particular patch, but the can-of-worms that it opens up. Note that this is just clearing the hardware statistics on the interface, and would not require any kind of atomic_increment addition for interfaces that support that. It would be kind-of awkward to implement this on drivers that increment stats in hardware though (lo, vlan, br, etc.) This also brings up the question of resetting the stats for 'netstat -s' What would be great is if ifconfig, netstat and their ilk just had a -z flag instead. This would write a file to the local user's home directory with a stats snapshot, and then every subsequent run would auto-calculate against the snapshot. You'd also need some way of resetting this when the stats actually _do_ reset (driver reload, reboot.) to avoid negative numbers. That way, you can get what you want without having to write a bunch of fragile, awkward scripts, and the kernel isn't throwing away information either. - Brent - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
