On Tue, 28 Apr 2009 06:31:16 -0700, Philip Pokorny wrote: > Why doesn't this fit the current temperature interface? What is there in the interface that says it has to be an absolute temperature and not a relative temperature? This isn't spelt out explicitly, but it is pretty implicit. Suddenly reporting relative temperature margins the same way we report absolute temperature values will only confuse the user (and ourselves.) When sensors report "+20 degrees", how will you know whether the system is totally overheating or if it is rather cold? If we start reporting temperature margins, the interface must be different from what we have today so that libsensors and other tools relying on our sysfs interface aren't screwed up. We want sensors and other tools to clearly label temperature margins as such. And really I think it makes a lot of sense to report relative temperatures, I have no objection to doing that. The absolute temperature is one thing, but the key information is whether the system is running within its thermal specs or not. > Alarms, min-max, hysterisis, etc all still work the same, they are just shifted so that the max limit is zero and the typical values are less than zero. We allow negative temperatures in the library. Just because we support them in the library doesn't mean all applications support them. I fixed a bug with negative temperatures in sensord a few months ago... Anyway the problem is not with negative values. The problem is that users must _know_ what they are seeing. So please let's not rush here. The proper interface, both at the sysfs and libsensors levels, should be discussed. -- Jean Delvare
