Книга: Embedded Linux Primer: A Practical, Real-World Approach

9.8.2. sysfs

9.8.2. sysfs

Like the /proc file system, sysfs is not representative of an actual physical device. Instead, sysfs models specific kernel objects such as physical devices and provides a way to associate devices with device drivers. Some agents in a typical Linux distribution depend on the information on sysfs.

We can get some idea of what kinds of objects are exported by looking directly at the directory structure exported by sysfs. Listing 9-17 shows the top-level /sys directory on our Coyote board.

Listing 9-17. Top-Level /sys Directory Contents

# dir /sys
total 0
drwxr-xr-x   21 root    root    0 Jan  1 00:00 block
drwxr-xr-x    6 root    root    0 Jan  1 00:00 bus
drwxr-xr-x   10 root    root    0 Jan  1 00:00 class
drwxr-xr-x    5 root    root    0 Jan  1 00:00 devices
drwxr-xr-x    2 root    root    0 Jan  1 00:00 firmware
drwxr-xr-x    2 root    root    0 Jan  1 00:00 kernel
drwxr-xr-x    5 root    root    0 Jan  1 00:00 module
drwxr-xr-x    2 root    root    0 Jan  1 00:00 power
#

As you can see, sysfs provides a subdirectory for each major class of system device, including the system buses. For example, under the block subdirectory, each block device is represented by a subdirectory entry. The same holds true for the other directories at the top level.

Most of the information stored by sysfs is in a format more suitable for machines than humans to read. For example, to discover the devices on the PCI bus, one could look directly at the /sys/bus/pci subdirectory. On our Coyote board, which has a single PCI device attached (an Ethernet card), the directory looks like this:

# ls /sys/bus/pci/devices/
0000:00:0f.0 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:0f.0

This entry is actually a symbolic link pointing to another node in the sysfs directory tree. We have formatted the output of ls here to illustrate this, while still fitting in a single line. The name of the symbolic link is the kernel's representation of the PCI bus, and it points to a devices subdirectory called pci0000:00 (the PCI bus representation), which contains a number of subdirectories and files representing attributes of this specific PCI device. As you can see, the data is rather difficult to discover and parse.

A useful utility exists to browse the sysfs file system directory structure. Called systool, it comes from the sysfsutils package found on sourceforge.net. Here is how systool would display the PCI bus from the previous discussion:

$ systool -b pci
 Bus = "pci"
 0000:00:0f.0 8086:1229

Again we see the kernel's representation of the bus and device (0f), but this time the tool displays the vendor ID (8086 = Intel) and device ID (1229 = eepro100 Ethernet card) obtained from the /sys/devices/pci0000:00 branch of /sys where these attributes are kept. Executed with no parameters, systool displays the top-level system hierarchy. Listing 9-18 is an example from our Coyote board.

Listing 9-18. Output from systool

$ systool
Supported sysfs buses:
        i2c
        ide
        pci
        platform
Supported sysfs classes:
        block
        i2c-adapter
        i2c-dev
        input
        mem
        misc
        net
        pci_bus
        tty
Supported sysfs devices:
        pci0000:00
        platform
        system

You can see from this listing the variety of system information available from sysfs. Many utilities use this information to determine the characteristics of system devices or to enforce system policies, such as power management and hot-plug capability.

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