Factoring out standard system information

[Scott Wheeler]

On Dec 29, 2005, at 8:00 PM, Adriaan de Groot wrote:

> There's a couple of non-portable system things that are really  
> popular to know
> for KDE applications. These are CPU information (load; percentage  
> time idle,
> interrupt, user, etc.), swap and RAM information (free and used).  
> Reading
> these data is a pain in the ass, and it's implemented who knows how  
> many
> times across the KDE codebase -- superkaramba, ksysguard and the just
> discovered (and hopelessly buggy) ktimemon come to mind. I think SK  
> has the
> most accurate code - at least it gives me numbers that match what  
> top(1) and
> swapinfo(8) tell me. KTimeMon has support for OSF but not for  
> FreeBSD, which
> is .. uncomfortable and/or weird.
>
> So would it make sense to factor this stuff out and stick it in  
> kdelibs
> somewhere? ksysinfo or some such -- one central place to query system
> resource usage, so there's only one place reading /proc/icky/ 
> memusage or
> calling sysctlbyname("hw.memusage") or calling table() or using kvm 
> (4).

I'd say that this is one of those things that could probably fairly  
easily go the FD.o route.  This is a problem that a lot of software  
has to deal with (I maintain something similar at the office) and is  
generally a pain to keep up to date, so the less versions of such  
that we have in the OSS world, the better.

One thing to keep in mind for such a piece of software is how you'll  
go about shipping updates -- at least on Linux it's unfortunately not  
uncommon for minor changes in the proc file system (which often  
happens in a kernel upgrade)  to break things that parse them.

-Scott