On Thu, 29 May 2008, Alan Cox wrote:

quoted

quoted

Many of the kernel's accounting accumulators cannot be reset.  We
handle that in userspace tools by using subtraction.

I don't think that should preclude the ability to reset these, unless it is
shown that it would break something very badly.

For one quite a few of the network cards keep the stats in hardware and
don't neccessarily have a way to reset them. In other cases there is a
mix of OS accumulated stats bulk updated by overflow events on the device
itself.

Its a lot of complexity, and changes all over the places for the sake of
a trivial userspace change. I would suggest you instead write a quick bit
of perl or python that fetches the stats and then updates every second
with the changes.

When diagnosing network problems, the ability to zero counters is
a major aid in diagnosis.  Writing scripts is not a general solution
since often several systems are involved and it's not simple to do
this via a script.  Saving stats output and running beforeafter on
a number of systems is a royal pain when troubleshooting.

I like the idea someone else had. where the clear stats actually did
a checkpoint of the stats, and then future get stats would return the
diff between the checkpointed and current values (perhaps there could
also be a mechanism to still get the absolute values if desired).

						-Bill