Here we are. It's been a long time since my last blog post and my last psutil release. The reason? I've been travelling! I mean... a lot. I've spent 3 months in Berlin, 3 weeks in Japan and 2 months in New York City. While I was there I finally had the chance to meet my friend Jay Loden in person. We originally started working on psutil together 7 years ago.
Back then I didn't know any C (and I'm still a terrible C developer), so he was crucial in developing the initial psutil skeleton, including macOS and Windows support. Needless to say that this release builds on that work.
net_if_addrs()
We're now able to list network interface addresses similarly to the ifconfig command on UNIX:
>>> import psutil
>>> from pprint import pprint
>>> pprint(psutil.net_if_addrs())
{'ethernet0': [snic(family=<AddressFamily.AF_INET: 2>,
address='10.0.0.4',
netmask='255.0.0.0',
broadcast='10.255.255.255'),
snic(family=<AddressFamily.AF_PACKET: 17>,
address='9c:eb:e8:0b:05:1f',
netmask=None,
broadcast='ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff')],
'localhost': [snic(family=<AddressFamily.AF_INET: 2>,
address='127.0.0.1',
netmask='255.0.0.0',
broadcast='127.0.0.1'),
snic(family=<AddressFamily.AF_PACKET: 17>,
address='00:00:00:00:00:00',
netmask=None,
broadcast='00:00:00:00:00:00')]}
This is limited to AF_INET (IPv4), AF_INET6 (IPv6) and AF_LINK (Ethernet) address families. If you want something more powerful (e.g. AF_BLUETOOTH) you can take a look at the netifaces extension. If you want to see how this is implemented, here's the code for POSIX and Windows:
net_if_stats()
This new function returns information about network interface cards:
>>> import psutil
>>> from pprint import pprint
>>> pprint(psutil.net_if_stats())
{'ethernet0': snicstats(isup=True,
duplex=<NicDuplex.NIC_DUPLEX_FULL: 2>,
speed=100,
mtu=1500),
'localhost': snicstats(isup=True,
duplex=<NicDuplex.NIC_DUPLEX_UNKNOWN: 0>,
speed=0,
mtu=65536)}
The implementation on each platform:
Also in 3.0
Beyond the network-interface APIs, psutil 3.0 ships a few other notable changes.
Several integer/string constants (IOPRIO_CLASS_*, NIC_DUPLEX_*, *_PRIORITY_CLASS) now return enum values on Python 3.4+.
Support for zombie processes on UNIX was broken. Covered in a separate post.
Final words
I must say I'm pretty satisfied with how psutil is evolving and with the enjoyment I still get every time I work on it. It now gets almost 800,000 downloads a month, which is quite remarkable for a Python library.
At this point, I consider psutil almost "complete" feature-wise, meaning I'm starting to run out of ideas for what to add next (see TODO). Going forward, development will likely focus on supporting more exotic platforms (OpenBSD #562, NetBSD PR-557, Android #355).
There have also been discussions on the python-ideas mailing list about including psutil in the Python stdlib, but even if that happens, it's still a long way off, as it would require a significant time investment that I currently don't have.
