[fm-discuss] Re: Sensor design doc now available

[Eric Schrock]

Cindi -

I've had a chance to take a closer look at the design doc.  It all looks
great, though I have a few high-level questions.  These might belong as
"future phases", but it would help to have some explanation in the
design document to know that the issues are being considered.

How do indicators relate to this work?  I see them mentioned when
disucssing the FMRI syntax, but nowhere else.  Are indicators related to
this work beyond the FMRI syntax, or is it completely separate?  Is
there a separate project to define the role of indicators in libtopo and
Solaris?

>From an implementation perspective, it would help to outline how the
facility nodes would will in libtopo.  How do I read sensor values from
the nodes?  Do they have all the standard properties of a topo node,
minus the obvious restriction of not having any children?

Is there going to be any standardization on the properties exported by a
sensor node?  I'm imagining what it would take to construct a generic
sensor browser.  While most of this is outside the scope of phase 1, and
falls under objective #3 (ability to watch sensors), it seems like some
minimal design decisions need to made just to prototype phase 1 and
justify the architecture.

We want the ability to export arbitrary payloads via sensors, but it
seems like if we're not careful we can end up with a fragmented
namespace that makes monitoring difficult.  Looking towards the future,
it would seem beneficial to define some common set of properties across
all sensors, even something as basic as "value", "units", and
(optionally) "threshold".

As a nit, does 'RTN' have to be capitalized?  It seems like all the
events in the registry use lowercase names, and the all caps name looks
a little off.  Although your fmdump example output uses lowercase, so
maybe this is just a case of inconsistency in the document.

Thanks,

- Eric
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