Max answered much of this in a more timely fashion than I, so I'll
just add a few snippets ...
On Wed, 7 Mar 2001 adrian.lukas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> hello everybody,
>
> i have the following questions:
>
> 1. Are any tutorials that describe some "pcp linux sessions"?
> In the "Admin's Guide" i read something about a "Tutorial".
> Is this tutorial available only for irix?
I've asked before (and got no response), seeking volunteers to help us
transform the Tutorial from HTML documents written for IRIX users to
something more OS neutral. It is not a big task, but some outside help
would certainly be appreciated.
> 2. In the "Admin's Guide" are some pcp tools described that
> are not present on linux distribution (at least on my box).
> Is that normal or i forget something? (example: pmchart)
In general terms the GUI tools and some collector plugins from SGI
are proprietary and intended to be used to manage the performance of
SGI servers. pmchart and pmview are the most obvious applications in
this group.
> ...
> 4. Where can i find a specification of the pcp communication
> protocol? (here i mean "pcp" protocol, not TCP/IP).
> (I read something about a text and a binary protocol...)
Since the communication is encapsulated in either pmcd or libraries,
for all the cases that are important most people (other than me!) can
safely ignore the protocol specifications (and they are not written
down anywhere). If you want to "see" the protocol in action, use
-Dpdu
on the command line to any PCP monitoring tool and you'll see the
messages that are sent and received. Beyond that src/libpcp/pdu.c and
src/libpcp/p_*.c are the places to look.
We use the binary protocol in all places (except the news PMDA, which
is a pretty pointless example, other than to reinforce why the ascii
protocol was never a good idea!). With hindsight (and if it had even
been an option at the time) investing in perl bindings to encapsulate
the binary protocols would have been smarter.
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