Hello Dominik, > Long time ago I adapted a simple Program named varyfan to the use of > sysfs. > Since I did it the first time, I had to adapt many things over the time > again and again, because there were many changes in the i2c part of > sysfs. If written in C, this program should rely on libsensors so that you don't have to care about the interface changes. What does this program do, BTW? If it controls the speed of the fans, you might want to try the scripts distributed with lm_sensors under prog/pwm. They have the benefit of being maintained so they keep working despite interface changes. > Now I again installed the current kernel onto my machine and nothing of > my stuff works any more. There were adaptions made in the kernel code > again, I think. No Problem, but as I wanted to read the documentation > in the kernel sources I found some black-holes ;-) > > porting-clients says: > > Use the file names specified in > Documentation/i2c/sysfs-interface > > But this file does not exist in the Tree since 2.6.13. True. The documentation was already fixed (in 2.6.16-rc1) to reflect the fact that this file was moved from Documentation/i2c to Documentation/hwmon. Thanks for reporting anyway. > To which (future) point in time do you see some convergence in the > interface. Why do you generally ever touch a running system? For fun. Because then users and developers start screaming all around the place, and this gives us a warm fuzzy feeling of unlimited power :) Seriously... The interface has been quite stable for the past year at least. We do out best to keep it stable but we also try to enforce a number of naming rules so that it is possible to write user-space tools which can work with all hardware monitoring drivers in a unified way. So when we discover names which do not comply with the naming rules, we fix them as soon as possible. We usually keep the old name around for some times so that people have the time to update their user-space stuff, but after some time we have to clean it up and only keep the new (correct) name. The only area where things have not completely stabilized yet is the automatic (hardware-driven) fan speed control. There is a proposed interface but it doesn't seem to please anyone (not that I didn't try hard...) and not all drivers follow it. I really don't have the time to work in this area right now, but when I do, changes might occur again, sorry. Thanks, -- Jean Delvare
