An Awesome Window Manager ECC Widget

This is a continuation of an earlier post regarding ECC memory under Linux, and is how I added a little widget to display the current ECC memory status. Because I don’t really know lua, most of the work is carried out with a shell script that is run via cron on a frequent basis.

The shell script simply runs edac-util to obtain the number of correctable errors and uncorrectable errors, and formats the numbers in a way suitable for setting the text of a widget :-

#!/bin/zsh
#
# Use edac-util to report some numbers to display ...

correctables=$(edac-util --report=ce | awk '{print $NF}')
uncorrectables=$(edac-util --report=ue | awk '{print $NF}')

c="chartreuse"
if [[ "$correctables" != "0" ]]
then 
  c="orange"
fi
if [[ "$uncorrectables" != "0" ]]
then
  c="red"
fi

echo "ECC: $correctables/$uncorrectables "

This is run with a crontab entry :-

*/7 * * * * /site/scripts/gen-ecc-wtext > /home/mike/lib/awesome/widget-texts/ecc-status

Once the file is being generated, the Awesome configuration can take effect :-

-- The following function does what it says and is used in a number of dumb widgets
-- to gather strings from shell scripts
function readfiletostring (filename)
  file = io.open(filename, "r")
  io.input(file)
  s = io.read()
  io.close(file)
  return s
end

eccstatus = wibox.widget.textbox()
eccstatus:set_markup(readfiletostring(homedir .. "/lib/awesome/widget-texts/ecc-status"))
eccstatustimer = timer({ timeout = 60 })
eccstatustimer:connect_signal("timeout",
  function()
      eccstatus:set_markup(readfiletostring(homedir .. "/lib/awesome/widget-texts/ecc-status"))
  end
)
eccstatustimer:start()
...
layout = wibox.layout.fixed.horizontal, ... eccstatus, ...

There plenty of ways this could be improved – there’s nothing really that requires a separate shell script, but this works which is good enough for now.