On Dec 2, 2005, at 7:33 AM, Elad Efrat wrote:

> Jason Thorpe wrote:
>
>> Not really.  sysctl was originally intended to turn knobs in the  
>> kernel.
>>
>> Sometimes I wish we had native Mach messaging...
>
> My "Design and Implementation of 4.4BSD" says sysctl was meant as a
> replacement for kmem, to put access control on reading/writing kernel
> objects.

Specifically, it was a nice replacement for running gdb against /dev/ 
kmem in /etc/rc to just to tweak a tunable parameter.

-- thorpej