On Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:43:29 +0100, Clemens Ladisch wrote: > Jean Delvare wrote: > > On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:29:25 +0100, Clemens Ladisch wrote: > > > There still is the built-in diode to be read by the motherboard, but the > > > internal sensor was never intended to be an absolute measurement but > > > just as a means for controlling the cooling. > > > > Still we use it for that purpose at the moment. Maybe we simply should > > not? > > Well, the absolute measurements have essentially the same purpose, and > would not make much sense without comparing them to some absolute limit. Of course. The problem is that users don't know that the temperature isn't real, and then get puzzled when comparing with other temperature sensors in their system, which _do_ report physical temperatures. > In any case, it might make more sense to show such values as something > like "20 °C below maximum". I think so, yes. Now the difficulty is to come up with a suitable sysfs interface. Dropping the current interface altogether doesn't sound right as it will take time before a new version of libsensors is written and spread out and all applications add support for the new interface. In the meantime, I guess we want users to still see the approximate value. So ideally we would come up with an interface that adds up to the one we have currently. Future libsensors/applications could read the extra information to display the value in a different format so that the users see the difference. An idea I have about this is adding a sysfs file temp#_relative, which would contain the fake temperature value that is used as a reference for the thermal sensor in question. In the case of k10temp, the value would be 70000. So for example we would have: temp1_input: 46000 temp1_relative: 70000 Old applications would display this as 46°C while new ones would display "24°C below the limit". For coretemp this could be 85000 or 100000 (at least in the case where we don't know the limit for sure.) If there are limits exported (temp1_max, temp1_crit etc.) the same offset could be applied to them too. This approach has the advantage of backwards compatibility. It may not be considered flexible enough though... For example it does not support sensors with totally arbitrary scales (where 1000 != 1°C.) I seem to remember we've seen this in the past? If others have ideas about how we can support this, I'm all ears. -- Jean Delvare _______________________________________________ lm-sensors mailing list lm-sensors@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.lm-sensors.org/mailman/listinfo/lm-sensors
