Re: KLive: Linux Kernel Live Usage Monitor

[Sven Ladegast <sven@linux4geeks.de>]

On Tue, 30 Aug 2005, Rogier Wolff wrote:

> It IS some "home phoning" and "spy software". However, when the
> goal is to sign you up for more direct marketing, people tend to
> object. When the goal is to keep track of running kernels, I'm
> hopeful that people will recognise that this is different.

The problem is that people made bad experiences with home-phoning software 
in the past. Changing their opinion about this issue isn't easy I think.
I can almost see the headlines: Spy software found in recent Linux 
kernels... :o)

Although home-phoning can be useful under certain circumstances it is the 
wrong way to implement it in a kernel. IMHO a userspace tool is the better 
solution: Everyone can decide if he/she wants to report what kernel 
version is running on their systems.

> A trick to use would be to send an UDP packet at boot (after 1 minute
> or so), and then randomly say "once a month" (i.e. about 1/30 chance of
> sending a packet on the first day) The number of these random packets
> recieved is a measure of the number of CPU-months that the kernel
> runs.

This could be a sloution but like you know UDP packets may or may not 
arrive the destination address. So the packet loss with this method could 
be very high, expecially if you send only one packet. Using a 
TCP-connection for this is a lot more stable and the payload can be 
encrypted too.

Once again: I think this is a userspace task.

Sven